I don’t mention my personal life on the Digital Edge blog because it’s supposed to be about digital media publishing. But a very interesting conversation last night with The Bakersfield Californian’s Dan Pacheco about the publication’s online Inside Guide was perfectly timed – and perfectly frustrating, when my husband, Joe, found a serious plumbing problem in our house.

The InsideGuide is very cool. The Californian has set up Bakersfield's restaurants with simple profile pages that includes hours of operation, location and more. And it's free for the restaurant. Restaurant customers who have profiles can rate and review the restaurant, and the restaurant owner can respond (to a limited extent). As the platform develops, there will be "enhanced" profile pages available for businesses (for a small fee), coupon programs and much more. Pacheco said it's really "MySpace meets Yellow Pages." The Inside Guide is really worth checking out.

(Note: If you'd like to learn more about the Inside Guide, I'll be writing an article about it for the Digital Edge in the next week or so -- stay tuned.)

Later this year, The Californian will expand the Inside Guide to the "services" category -- car repair and home contractors...and plumbers, which is where my story starts.

Just before 9 p.m., Joe discovered our third floor bathroom flooded (broken toilet part) and water had seeped through the floor. The ceiling of the floor below the flooded bathroom had a huge (1/4" wide by about 4' long) crack in it, through which water was dripping. Joe shut off the water to the entire house (I later learned that wasn't necessary) and asked me to call a plumber.

As a very new, first-time homeowners -- we closed on the place 10 days ago -- we were at a bit of a loss. Until becoming homeowners, we just called the landlord of our rental place and the problem solved itself. (Ahh, the charmed life of renters.) How do you find a good, not-too-expensive 24-hour plumber?

I had checked out Angie's List, an online review site, earlier this week for another project, but I quit when I discovered I had to pay to get information. (As a side note, check out this Washington Post article about a libel suit involving reviews posted on Angie's List.) Our local paper doesn't have an Inside Guide-type thing, and I didn't have time to surf around the Web to find local plumber reviews.

So I turned to the big, printed Yellow Pages book and looked for any large ad that said "24-Hour Emergency Service." I called a well-known, national plumbing company that had a coupon for emergency work. Someone arrived an hour later.

It would have been so useful to get on the Web, go to my local area Inside Guide and find a reputable, inexpensive plumber. My method of choosing was basically reduced to the equivalent of closing my eyes and pointing at the page.

In my interview with Pacheco, he said services like Google and Yahoo that have local guides are generally not going to have people on the ground contacting businesses for more information (Bakersfield has someone doing this for the Inside Guide) and getting detailed, accurrate information like a local newspaper can.

In the six weeks since the Inside Guide launched, Pacheco said their guide is already more comprehensive than any of the competition. Traffic to it is great, restaurant owners are very interested and all signs point to success. "We're here, this is our turf, and we focus on local," he said. "There are things we can do that our competitors who are national can't do."

Around 9 p.m. last night, with water leaking from the ceiling, I was in serious need of an Inside Guide.

As a consumer, I hope the Bakersfield model catches on because clearly it can be a useful (free) service. As a digital media researcher, I hope the Bakersfield model catches on because, as Dan said, this represents a huge growth area where a newspaper company can really take advantage of their community connection and hyperlocal information in an especially effective Web 2.0 way.