It's easy to see the commercial value here. Saves time, saves tons of hassle, creates more transparency. Raises the question... why are so many people talking about "Trout Fishing" in North Carolina :)
Ha, thanks for the comment. Funny seeing searches for "trout fishing" increasing on our realtime web analytics :) Speaking of which, we are pretty interested in things like trending topics so that you can see what citizens in a particular geography are discussing. This is a bit different -- and in many ways, more interesting -- than what Twitter does today in regards to trending topics based on location, because discussion on government social networking sites is actually about the region itself.