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Yahoo Local is further expanding its ongoing initiative by rolling out a new feature called Neighbors. It was the product of the last Yahoo Hack Day, and the company has decided to test out the feature in two California markets for the time being; Sacramento and San Carlos.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Neighbors actually consists of tools from Yahoo Answers and functions from Yahoo's suggestion boards, and it allows users to discuss and organize around local issues. The purpose is to enable users to make suggestions for the improvement and maintenance of their communities, and even offers the ability to vote on suggestions. As with Yahoo Answers, a large text box is readily available for you to simply enter your suggestions to th community. Voting is done in a Digg-style manners, with thumbs up and thumbs down options. You can further browse by specific address, category, and most active issues for that community.
If this grows, I imagine even more filtering and group-forming functionality will be incorporated into Neigbors, so you can organize on a hyper-local level (for instance, there are several "neighborhoods" in Chicago, so issues on the Gold Coast may have little bearing on issues in the West Loop). And with an active, local community working together in this online manner, additional group tools, from admin to messaging, would be a good inclusion as well. Even maps, similar to what Google rolled out for International Clean Up Weekend, and other tools would help users "take action."
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[via search engine land]