Boston is the bloggiest!

Hi! This is from today's Boston Globe. One thing the article didn't talk about is also that Boston is also incredibly "pet/dog" friendly and we are sure all those dogs and kitties are blogging fools too! At least that is our story and we are sticking to it!!

Post this: Boston top blog city:

Boston has long been viewed as the land of the bean and the cod - and now the Hub may also be the land of the blog.

According to OutsideIn.com, a website that tracks neighborhood blogging, Boston was the "bloggiest city" in America for the two-month period of March and April.

Behind Boston were Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.

OutsideIn.com says it tracks blogging activity in about 60 urban areas and nearly 3,500 neighborhoods, and it arrived at its rankings through a "blogging quotient" that factors in a metropolitan area's population with the number of blog posts about a specific location.
By that measure, Greater Boston had 89 posts per 100,000 residents, edging out Greater Philadelphia, which had 88 posts, and Greater Pittsburgh, which had 53 posts, Outsidein.com said.

Surprisingly, perhaps, such well-wired metro areas as San Francisco and Seattle were farther down the list, with roughly 40 posts per 100,000 residents, Outsidein.com said.
Why was Greater Boston number one? Outsidein.com chief executive Steven Berlin Johnson offered this theory: Blogs thrive where locals are wired, well-educated, and obsessed with politics, a topic that inspires bloggers to unleash their prose. Another popular blog topic locally: healthcare.

Outsidein.com is focused on neighborhoods, and its business model is to attract advertising dollars from neighborhood merchants as well as from national businesses looking to target ads by zip codes, Johnson said.

Shortly after its October launch, Outsidein.com examined blogging by neighborhood, using a software analysis that tallied up the number of posts about specific neighborhoods.
Watertown and Newton ranked high, but Brooklyn, N.Y., was the bloggiest neighborhood - indeed, if Brooklyn were regarded as a separate city, it might have eclipsed the Hub as the bloggiest city, Johnson said.

A neighborhood undergoing gentrification is often fertile territory for location-specific blogs, and not only is Brooklyn gentrifying; it's also filled with people who either "write for a living or who want to write for a living," Johnson said.

Blogs are such a new phenomenon that methods for tracking blog activity are still in their early stages, said David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

And in seeking to pinpoint blogging hotbeds, he added, raw numbers may not tell the whole story; also relevant are the quality of the content and whether blog posts help build a community.

Still, Weinberger said, "I'm proud to live in the bloggiest city in the universe."

By Chris Reidy, Boston Globe staff