The New Work of Composing

Recommendation site yelp asks users to share their local knowledge of businesses and organizations ranging from restaurants to churches. As their tagline says, “Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great—and not so great—in your area.” The focus of yelp is information in the form of reviews about locales in a given area. Users generate and post reviews on a 1-5 star rating scale. Each listing includes details such as address, phone number, hours, and parking. The navigation of the site works on a city-based organization scheme that further divides content into varying categories. The city-based navigation scheme only lists the most popular areas, which means the most active and most visited city pages. To see a list of cities by state, users must visit two additional pages by clicking the "more" link at the bottom of the city-based list. It is less complicated to use the search bar, considering smaller communities such as Bloomington, Illinois are left out of the city-based scheme. Though yelp attempts to create a community by collecting and organizing reviews, it does so mostly for metropolitan areas like Houston, New York, and San Francisco.

Additionally, “weekly yelps,” a kind of newsletter, are constructed around fifteen metropolitan locations such as Houston, Boston, and Seattle. The focus of the “weekly yelps” ranges from pizza reviews to museum exhibits, wine events, and specific neighborhood eateries. The topics grow out of the user reviews. The content of the weekly yelp is culled each week from reviews posted by members of the yelp community. For example, a weekly yelp on a Houston neighborhood called “The Heights” reads, “When second-hand kicks won't cut it but eco-friendliness counts, Urban Soles Outpost helps Trevor B achieve that fine balance. While Liz S falls in love with ‘notecards and gifty things’ at Tansu, Rose K counts her love for the funky Jubilee in cupcake-shaped soaps” ("Yelp Conquers Our Fear").

The weekly yelps can only be found from the fifteen individual city pages. If your town or city isn’t included, you would only see this content by visiting one of the selected city’s pages. Likewise, the Yelp events feature is only available to certain areas. Interestingly, Miami, a large metropolitan area, is not one of the cities with event or weekly yelp content. While yelp staff seems to have chosen the cities for the weekly yelps, the lack of content for other locations is mostly due to lack of participation. So if users in Miami haven’t added events for the month or the week, the yelp events feature is unavailable. The interface changes depending on participation. The more users contribute to their city pages, the more content available to other users. If content for the different features has not been written by users for a given area, the interface feature does not show up on the city-based page. The drawback to this level of flexibility on yelp’s interface is that users may not be aware of the range of content available if they only visit the page unique to their location.

Metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles garner most of the attention on yelp because users in those areas have contributed the most content. It isn’t surprising that users in these areas struggle more with their collective identities and see contributing content as a way to connect to others in their area. Additionally, users in these areas may have multiple layers of zoom and various points of relevance depending on their social proximity. People in urban environments have a different conceptualization of neighborhood than those who live in the suburbs or in rural areas. As such, there is a potential for experiencing intense levels of nostalgia for the traditional notion of neighborhood and community. Yelp provides a way to connect to people living in your area, or to others who may be visiting. Participating in yelp helps users construct their collective identity as New Yorker, Los Angelino, Bostonian, etc. Hyperlocal content does not necessarily mean focusing on smaller areas and excluding metropolitan areas like New York or Dallas. As a matter of fact, many sites I discuss throughout this webtext have the bulk of their content geared toward major cities rather than small towns.