Tom Evslin says the future is local:

Local sites are one of the next great web opportunities.  But the great local sites, even the very good local sites, will be those that are intensely local – not the local spawn of a global or even national mother-ship, not clones of a single success.

Nevertheless, there are global opportunities in supporting and enabling the wave of local sites to come.  If you are an entrepreneur who wants to succeed in local, you’ll have to decide whether you want to succeed locally by making a local site a success or globally by empowering the success of very individual local sites.

Since these sites will serve a single locality or a cluster of nearby places, they will have neither the need nor the budget to invent technology. They will succeed based on their content and the online dimension they add to the existing local communities; but they’ll fail if their technology sucks.

The success stories of today aren’t the conglomerates of bloggers – they are the individual blogs that have become hits or category leaders, the tools that made blogging so easy to do, and the information services that made blogs discoverable and searchable. The success stories of local will be community sites – some horizontal, some vertical, some large, some small – that have become essential and the tools that enable these sites to concentrate on content and community rather than technology.

As a side note, I almost had a fit try to find the Permalink for his post. May I suggest hAtom markup?