Jim Moran is co-founder of Yipit. Yipit was an early entrant into deal aggregation space and the company recently raised $6 million in funding. The site gathers offers from Groupon, LivingSocial, AmazonLocal, Google Offers and 750+ daily deal sites in 118 cities and sends the best to you each day based on your preferences. Yipit also provides daily deal data and insights to the industry and investor communities.

In a previous life, Jim worked in mergers & acquisitions at The Blackstone Group. He writes short thoughts about the Daily Deal space on Twitter (@jdmoran) and more careful thoughts on the Yipit Blog. He earned his stripes in Local the hard way and was one of the first to aggregate daily deals.

He is both a participant and an astute observer of the deal environment. If you are looking to for an expert to follow in that space, he is your man. Here is his take on the articles that most influenced his thinking during the past year.

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The LOCAL Innovator’s Dilemma – I wish I had read this article before getting into local five years ago. Would have accelerated our thinking substantially as we made sense of local. Spot on summary of challenges facing local startups.

Groupon S-1 Reveals Business Model Deteriorating in Oldest Markets – The Yipit Blog post with the largest response this year. Outlines issues with Groupon’s business model as made clear in their S1. All their graphs are moving in the wrong direction, so the clock is ticking for them to evolve their business model.

Groupon Buys OpenCal, Launches Online Appointment Booking Service ‘Scheduler’ – This may end up being the evolution Groupon is looking for. Representative of their strategic shift this year towards leveraging their scale to attack existing successful business models (in this case OpenTable, but in other cases, travel, ecommerce) vs inventing completely new experiences (Groupon Now, Groupon Stores, etc), which has so far been unsuccessful.

What Went Wrong in the Daily Deals Space? – Rob does a terrific job of illustrating some of the game theory issues driving follow on competitors in the deal space. I think a lot of this gets sorted out in 2012.