I’d say the 8 million user reviews are Google’s focus. Yelp’s reviews in combination with Google’s products might give a user a more complete information picture of local venues/services in the U.S. Yelp would also perhaps augment any similar Google local review product already in existence (though I am not sure what that is; maybe you know Peter?). And I am sure Google could attach ads to some kind of “Yoogle” arrangement it might have created.

But I suspect that this all represents the “800lb Gorilla” that nobody in big web businesses wants to face: All those millions and millions of human hours people have put in to writing insightful reviews, blog posts, comments across the web in the last 15+ years — all of that effort is perhaps worth multiple billions, maybe trillions of dollars collectively.

In something more narrow like Yelp, are the value of its reviews acknowledged, are the writers of those 8 million reviews compensated? Nope and certainly Yelp could reasonably argue that there was nothing in the terms of use of the site suggesting Yelp would compensate anybody for anything in the case of a buyout.

Anyway, I hope more and more people who regularly write online begin to take the aforementioned in to account going in to 2010 and beyond — don’t regard what you write online as necessarily valueless; if perhaps you don’t act individually or collectively to monetize your content, somebody else might.