Tom Evslin has a great blog and I just came across his post about the opportunity in the local internet. While I’ve written before about the challenges in building a local business that scales, Tom makes some great points about why the potential in local online is so great.

Tipping points happen all at once and they’re only visible with hindsight.  We’re at a tipping point now: three-quarters of US Internet users or half of all US households have broadband connections. Not all of these connections are equal but most can download and watch videos, surf complex websites, and search the Web itself at a comfortable pace.  The importance of these statistics is that there is now a critical mass of people who can and will take advantage of and interact with rich LOCAL content.

The opportunity, if you’re an entrepreneurial sort, is that there isn’t much rich local content to interact with for the very good reason that, until now, the local communities were below critical mass of enabled households.  It used to be that the big bucks were in developing and enabling services with large audiences drawn from a worldwide or at least national prospect pool.  Now the opportunity is to bring the benefits of the interactive Web to every local community.  It’s huge!

We’ve learned  a lot about the local segment at Judy’s Book and I think Tom is right about the value of rich local content to consumers. The challenges of aggregation and fragmentation still apply, but it can definitely be done. I think winning approaches will be those that figure out how to crack the local aggregation nut - both from an audience and a content perspective.