Hey ASM
Yelp.com has tons of great content re restaurants and, more recently, nightlife/clubbing/afterhours listings. I'm sure they probably started by having some staffers "seed" the site (we've done these before for different sites
) but let the community take over the content generation.
It seems to be getting a lot of traction since its city coverage is spreading pretty fast.
I wouldn't be surprised to read an entry at TECH CRUNCH
http://www.techcrunch.com/ announcing that Yelp's been sold. There are however, some challenges: maintaining the speed and depth of coverage of cities and keeping it's user base motivated in supplying free content to the site. With that said, it's profile system, ease of use, and personality-driven features make it a good Web 2.0 iteration of the old review site model.