Fragmentation isn't really the main issue. Someone will come along and snatch a lot of market share when it's meant to happen. So far, no one site offers a lo

Fragmentation isn't really the main issue. Someone will come along and snatch a lot of market share when it's meant to happen. So far, no one site offers a local experience that meets anyone's expectation of how broad a local community's interests or behaviors should be. Facebook tends to be a closed circle. Patch has been plagued by both abusive, anonymous commenters and astroturf. Yelp seems focused on reviews and not on giving people their own voice and creativity. Groupon shows hardly any community interaction. We still don't see many well-known sites that come close to offering the authentic experience of living in a mostly caring and helpful town with myriad subject matter experts. Some of these sites are more like the lunatics running the asylum. It's the same problem the editorial page has had for ages-- it acts like flypaper! The business model that can afford to carefully curate so much hyperlocal content really does not exist yet, so we find ourselves settling for something less until then.