Street Fight Daily: 05.12.11

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Murphy USA, a gas station chain with 1,000 locations situated in the parking lots of Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, announced Wednesday that it’s offering $2 off a $20 purchase of gas with a Foursquare checkin. (Mashable)

Gannett Co. is in the process of launching dozens of hyperlocal Web sites in 10 different markets, in a bold and risky initiative. DataSphere handles ad sales for Gannett’s hyperlocal sites, which are viewed as a growth medium because they provide smaller local businesses with an affordable, highly targeted ad platform. (NetNewsCheck)

Yelp’s international sites have been growing like crazy, with non-U.S. traffic doubling in the past year. Yesterday it added a fifth non-English international site, Spain, to its roster. The company is now at 50 million unique visitors per month, mostly in the U.S., according to its internal stats. (TechCrunch)

The company Beyond has published an infographic that details the findings of their research into social location applications. It’s no surprise to learn that after years of Foursquare and quite some time with Facebook Places, it’s still only hardcore early adopters who tend to be using these services. (TheNextWeb)

“Patch’s problem now: If you don’t pay people for their work (and writing is work), most people won’t do the work,” writes Mark Leccese. “And Patch is going to start seeing another problem very soon — unpaid bloggers have no incentive to write other than their own motivation.” (Boston Globe/Gatekeeper)

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