If you are treated exceptionally well by someone in the service industry,

[klook]

28. Link here:

Yelp (http://www.yelp.com) is an interactive site where ordinary citizens post reviews and tips about local businesses. Categories include restaurants, clubs, shopping, real estate, education, financial services, automotive, "Hot New Businesses," etc. They have sites for many different cities. Within a city site there are also links to neighborhoods.

The reviews are not always as reliable as, say, Lonely Planet or Fodor's (or a good local newspaper), but you get a feel for what regular people think vs. professional reviewers. And they must do some checking for false reviews planted by business owners or their competitors, because I haven't seen anything that looks fake.

Sometimes the reviews and comments are useful, sometimes snarky, sometimes shallow and idiotic, and sometimes the writing is really good and entertaining -- like so many things on teh Internets, you just have to sort through the info you find and use your best judgement as to what's relevant to you.

Some Yelpers (yes, that's what site members are called) use the social networking aspects of the site, posting info about themselves, their picture(s), links to friends' profiles, details about events they've attended or plan to attend -- way too much personal information for my taste, but if that's your thing you can connect to communities and networks via Yelp, too.