move over Ma Bell, here comes Ma Bezos

Presumably you've seen the new A9 yellow pages search, which is enhanced with photographs of the resulting address locations (currently covers 10 US cities)? It's pretty cool, and I love the geeky audacity of them actually driving around all the commercial streets of several large metro areas taking photographs every few meters. But the part that really got my attention was the potential for this to turn into a large scale distributed cooperation effort, where business owners, customers, and other interested parties shared their own photos, information, reviews, RSS feeds, and sundry metadata to turn the humble yellow pages into a vast, living, er... conversation... about the (commercial) world. Don't like the picture that comes up next to your store's listing? Upload a better one. Had a great meal at that restaurant? Write your review (and textit/post it from your favorite location-enabled mobile blogging device ;-). A9 only drove 10 cities? No worries, we'll take care of the rest.

Hey A9 team: how about supporting RSS feeds and trackbacks for the YP search results? That could be a lot of fun, and I'm pretty sure there's an interesting value proposition for the businesses in your listings.

[via AndyF-who-needs-to-get-an-outside-blog-so-I-can-ping-him]