Matthew Sollars from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism calculates on hyperlocal news market models, assuming that the local daily newspaper has gone away. View bis Framework/Hyperlocal business model as a Google Document here.

He did so without mentioning maps as a base for hyperlocal news.

AllDirections points to a Microsoft job offering in Seattle containing interesting usage stats about MSN and Virtual Earth:

"over 600 internally developed sites serving 284M unique users/month and 15.5B pageviews/month. Those sites consume hundreds of applications/services, run over 400,000 feed ingestion jobs each day, and are served globally to 44 markets via 6 datacenters. Virtual Earth powers over 3000 enterprise customers and the Live Maps, Local Search, and 3D products."

Besides the numbercrunching: we're hiring also - if Seattle is too far reaching for you ;-)