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Montreal-based local search startup Praized Media has received C$1 million (US$1 million) in seed funding from Garage Technology Ventures Canada. The company’s website says Praized Media is developing an application that enables users to find and discover local places and merchants with the help of a web 2.0 style community. The product is expected to launch early next year. It will not only allow users to list merchants they’ve found, but it will also offer a platform for local businesses to generate leads. Praized Media also says it will be connecting local search with blogs and social networks in a new way.

Actually, I think combining local search with web 2.0 features is a pretty good idea. Marchex has been doing a few steps into this direction by allowing users to review local businesses, for example. Though, the big advantadge of Marchex is their huge portfolio of local domain names, which drives tons of targeted traffic to the company’s local search pages. There are, however, still lots of possibilities for Marchex to improve their websites, because it hasn’t really developed its thousands of domain names yet. By adding blogs and social networking stuff Marchex could generate much more content while acquiring a loyal user base at the same time. This in combination with editorial content and SEO parking pages would bring Marchex’s domain portfolio much closer to actually being a portfolio consisting of “fully developed” websites.