Plotting information on online maps is all the rage, from real estate listings to venture capital financings.

Now, Urbanspoon -- a restaurant guide for Seattle, Chicago and New York -- just rolled out a feature called "Seattle Restaurants at Night." The company says the mapping service is "kind of like flying over a city on a dark night, except only the restaurants have their lights on."

A pretty cool service, which Seattlest also digs.

Speaking of restaurant reviews, Judy's Book founder Andy Sack writes on his blog today that the Internet startup screwed up by not focusing solely on restaurant reviews.

Sack writes: "...Focusing on restaurants and consumer passion would have been the right decision in retrospect. Once we owned this market, we could have moved to other categories."

Judy's Book is now switching gears to become more of a local shopping service, though you still gotta love the candor of Sack.

And speaking of online restaurant guides, there is a new entrant in this category.

John Li, a former Microsoft developer and program manager, is the brainchild behind Menuism, a Seattle online restaurant guide whose tagline is "Rate What You Ate."

I was just working on a post about the Web 2.0 startup when I came across Sack's blog post and the "Seattle Restaurants at Night" map.

Menuism still doesn't have the content of the competition, but Li says it will ramp up marketing and promotions in the coming weeks. He says the site is different from others because it employs a wiki approach that encourages users to submit everything about a restaurant: menus, dishes, photos, etc.

"Focusing on the restaurants, dishes, and real user opinions gives us more information to aggregate for users to make better decisions about where and what to eat. This focus also lets us offer unique features such as personalized restaurant recommendations and food comparisons across restaurants," he writes.

Seems like that's the type of focus that Sack was talking about, though I still have doubts whether a new entrant can compete against the likes of Yelp and Citysearch.