Among the URLs they own are many local verticals, like www.newyorkdoctors.com, and "tens of thousands" of local zips -- e.g., www.90210.com -- covering, they claim, 96% of zip areas in the US.

This Marchex press release give more details. And NYT's Louise Story blogs about the Marchex business model here.

I looked at their www.48161.com -- my hometown, Monroe, MI. It appears that what they're doing is spidering the web to collect business listings and user reviews from existing sites, and pouring them into templates according to locale. Presto -- local kudzu.com-style sites pre-populated with a pretty fair number of local businesses and at least some user reviews. (When you click to see the complete text of someone's review, it sends you to the non-Marchex site where the review was originated. However, the Marchex platform includes a tool to let its users write reviews, so they will be accumulating reviews of their own as well.)

Before seeing the Marchex play, it hadn't occurred to me that aggregating reviews and directory listings from other websites could be a strategy to bootstrap a local "kudzu" play. This seems to be basically the same thing Topix.com does with local news.

It will take more reviews before the Monroe site becomes a great local resource for Monroe people, but Marchex is on the way to fulfilling the massive local job of "help me decide where to spend my money" there and in thousands of other local markets. Meanwhile, the Monroe Evening News and most other papers offer nothing like this for their communities.

To me, this "job" of helping people make smart spending decisions in a local market is one of the biggest N2-style local information opportunities - one that every local newspaper should be moving aggressively to own. We can't afford to let this opportunity get away without a fight.

On the revenue side, Marchex appears to be focused solely on reaping ad revenue from national companies across the network of local sites they've created. I don't see any evidence that they're thinking - yet - about how to sell in local markets.

But the local piece could be a very big opportunity, as kudzu.com shows. And there, local newspapers papers could bring quite a bit to the party. They have local sales staffs, local business relationships, local brand power, and local marketing channels, all of which could dramatically accelerate the growth of local user-review sites - and all of which Marchex lacks.

If Marchex were interested in partnering with local papers on mutually agreeable terms, providing attractive revenue splits on advertising sales and allowing local papers to co-brand (or even rebrand) the Marchex sites, conceivably it might be a good deal for everybody.

Otherwise, local newspapers should be going it alone, based on their considerable local strengths, and their native desire to be the preferred local information provider to their communities.

So, here's a question: Does anyone know of a platform that newspaper companies could adopt or buy to create their own local version of this without massive programming requirements?

If so, please email me here.