WAPO's Loudoun Extra Online

The Washington Post launched its LoudounExtra.com site today - good looking site with a certain focus on Loudoun County, mostly compiled by Loudoun area and regional reporters, with an effort to start bulking up on content submitted by readers (through surveys/votes, blogs, directories, photos, etc.). It's touted as a real effort at "Micro-regional Web 2.0" - though it's not quite as "Micro" as some of the regional newspaper sites (i.e. the Connection) or hyper-regional Portals like Dulles South Online, which tend to provide extra Loudoun and surrounding area content truly from a residential and small business perspective.

An initial glitch - wasn't able to comment on the blogs...but overall, looks like a pretty good job (though I don't like flash, especially when it takes long to load - Loudouni.com learned that lesson the hard way), and we'll see how this experiment works in the absence (now) of the only other purely user-generated-content-driven regional effort (BackFence.com - which basically stopped operations last month).

Update - I'll claim the first "500" error (i.e. "Internal Server Error", and then a hard redirect to a very bad internal error page) for the site, when trying to do searches.