Ask City launches to take on Windows Live Local, Google Local and Yahoo Local. At first glance, it looks like a solid, competitive offering. I particularly like the ability to take a snapshot (bookmark) of your searches and save them for future use.

Ask City incorporates features from a number of third-party sources but, most interestingly for real estate readers, from Yelp, Judy’s Book and CitySearch. These sources power Ask City’s ratings for each listing it returns. Here’s a listing of Agents & Brokers in my zip code, as an example.

Regular readers will know, I’ve been harping on the growing importance of online reputation management (e.g. Rapleaf’s Real World Feedback System) for a while now. I think Ask’s new product aptly demonstrates this point as it is pushing these rankings/ratings deeper into the mainstream. Agents and brokers are going to have to be aware of the need to monitor their rankings on these search sites as I think they are going to increasingly become important lead generators.

Trulia adds Google Earth (kml) feeds to its search results bringing my dream of conducting a Virtual World real estate search one step closer.

Carnival of Real Estate is up at the Property Monger.

Real Estate Bookmarks is a del.icio.us clone designed specifically for sharing real estate-related bookmarks. Their database seems to be mainly populated with agent sites, though it does seem to work easily enough. I created an account and added my site with little trouble. Honestly, I can’t see the point though, as del.icio.us works just fine for me right now.

Speaking of del.icio.us, you can see my bookmarks on del.icio.us here. I’ve also been trying to get the del.icio.us “thingy” to automatically post my daily links to this blog – but with little success. If any of you can figure it out, let me know.

Finally, if you have an article, blog post or specific tidbit you’d like to share with me, tag it with the ‘tforem’ tag to del.icio.us and I’ll be sure to read it.

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I’m becoming increasingly intrigued by the number of “local” web sites that are being launched or revamped at the moment. Backfence.com, which launched its newest California site this week, is just another in a long line of similar sites in the same space: Kudzu.com, Judy’s Book (read my take on them here) and Yelp.com, to name just a few. Search Engine Journal reports that Yahoo! Local has updated this week as well.

While the ‘local’ concept isn’t new, it looks to me like many of these sites have finally hit on the magic combination of mashups, reviews, social networking and news that create the elusive “stickiness” factor that so many sites fail to find. Finally, many of these sites are actually useable and offer some great information to consumers.

I think we’re on the verge of a tipping point here, where some of these sites actually start to cross over into the mainstream and move out of the geek/Web 2.0 crowd.

Of course, with so many competing sites out there, there’s bound to be a shakeout. And I’m not sure which of these sites will still be standing a year from now (though the smart money is on Yahoo! being one of them), but as the dust settles I’m sure we’ll start to see who the clear winners are.

The bottom line is I think there is an incredibly rich opportunity here for some smart advertising by Realtors. As the feature sets become more and more compelling, consumers will migrate onto these local/neighborhood sites, and with the right ad buy a smart Realtor or Broker could be right there in front of them.

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