At the Backfence event, the Backfence people were setting up a Palo Alto focused site, but folks in attendence felt like their geographic identity spanned Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Which set me musing on Bay Area identity. I haven’t been here that long, so this observation could be either trivially obvious or wrong. But it seems to me that Bay Area folk have an interesting composite regional identity. There’s a part of one’s identity that’s affiliated with a town: Palo Alto, Half Moon Bay, Fremont, Berkeley. There’s part of the identity that is regional; identifying with regional transportation, regional landmarks, other issues that might be going on across the bay. And there’s part of the local identity that is social and/or professional — going to Barcamp in San Francisco or Blogher in San Jose. Is this right, dead obvious, or wrong?
It would be interesting to have a tagged and geocoded service that let you pick or zoom to the appropriate level of geographic and topical interest, and didn’t constrain you to one of them. Out of the various services I’ve seen, Yelp does a pretty good job of allowing you to find things by genre, and within an x mile radius of a particular place.