How do we know we're building the right thing with Neighborlogs? When we see a dedicated neighborhood news gatherer get his first big advertiser on a Neighborlogs site, we know we're on to something. Congratulations Curt and EastLakeAve -- you're doing a great job.

We know it when two more sites using our services have been added to the Seattle Times local news partnership -- that makes four of us now out of 16 neighborhoods. Yay!

We also know it when a veteran of the digital hyperlocal scene weighs 15 criteria for picking a content management system for an ad-driven hyperlocal news website and chooses us. That's a good sign!

Here are the first three factors for SunValleyOnline's Dave Chase:

No developer required: In my opinion, it is no longer necessary for 98 percent of sites to have a Web developer on staff. Fortunately, there are many off-the-shelf solutions that don't require an in-house technologist. There may be occasional needs where a developer can be contracted to do specific work but at the early stages of a site's development, I think a site should be focused on other items rather than doing custom development. As long as your CMS has the ability to extend it later, you can defer bringing on a technologist and save yourself money. Of course, there are hyperlocal sites founded by people with technology skills, and they can certainly take advantage of that, but it's not a requirement to get off the ground.

Open: It should be very easy to add and delete modules to a page or an entire site, such as social media features, inbound RSS feeds (i.e., pulling in a news feed from another site), and widgets of all types from weather to flickr slideshows to polls to various monetizable elements from any number of third parties.

Easy to monetize: This relates to the next point ("Open"). Most sites are limited to generating revenue using standard display ads. While that is the right place to start, this is a highly dynamic sector and thus it should be easy to extend your site with various other capabilities whether it is turning standard display ads into video ads or incorporating high-quality ad networks, it should be as easy as "copy and paste" to add these capabilities to your site.

You can see the rest of his list, find out what he loves about Neighborlogs (and a few of things he doesn't!) and let him know what criteria you think are most important here.

You can also check out Dave's previous site here -- and get a preview of his new Neighborlogs-powered site here.