I’ve refused requests to advertise on my blog to date, and have not incorporated google ads or adsense because I want to respect my audience. Anything that I publish must provide a relevant valuable service. To this end I have been looking at services that aggregate restaurant details. A hyperlocal site like mine would benefit from providing a dynamic listing of local places to eat along with their contact details.

So far I’ve looked at three services and all have failed the hyperlocal test. The menulog people want me to run generic banner ads because they have not yet implemented an API that would allow me to pull in a dynamic rich content feed of their data showing pics and text of restaurants only in Fitzroy. No thanks. Do you understand what ‘local’ means?

The webmenus site is dumb and says nothing about the purpose of the site or why anyone should use it. While their search is good, they have no content, and so they offer nothing useful to the visitor. They fail the useability test. Also, their blog does not list the date posts have been published, which for me is very useful information.

Finally, foodgod’s search is stupid or their data is deficient because they only list 7 places for ‘Fitzroy’ and some of those are in St Kilda (because of Fitzroy St). And their UI is ugly. Weakest link etc…

None of these sites has the needs and wants of their supposed users central to their construction or business models. I suspect all are doomed to fail.