Yahoo! Our City - Bangalore

Yahoo! has started a new Our City portal. Right now, it is in beta and only available on Yahoo's India site (yahoo.in) for Bangalore and New Delhi.

This new effort by Yahoo! is a great example of what a localized web portal should be. The best thing about this site is that it is a mash-up, weaving together information from a variety of sources, including and not limited to, Wikipedia, Yahoo! News, Upcoming.org (for events), del.icio.us (for bookmarks), The Weather Channel, various blog sources including Bangalore Metblogs and Flickr (for photos).

Since the information on this local portal is culled from many different sources which are constantly updated, it ensures that the portal always presents fresh information to visitors. Too bad that there is still no worthy online mapping application for Indian cities. It would have been a perfect fit here.

My favorite part of the site is Kannada World. At a time when many organizations and individuals in/about Bangalore easily forget Kannada, it is heartening to see Yahoo! put in a special Kannada section. Way to win the hearts of local people. The next step on the portal is to change all references to Bangalore to Bengalooru. :-)