The bloggiest neighborhoods

Six months ago, this story wouldn't have caught my eye.  But now... I just had to read it.

MediaLife today reports on a survey that shows the "bloggiest" neighborhoods.  Guess which is the winner?  Clinton Hill in Brooklyn.  

Yes, good ole' Brooklyn -- home of The Brooklyn Dodgers, Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs, the Coney Island Cyclone, Junior's cheesecake and enough people to make it the 4th or 5th largest city in the U.S.

But a blogging hotbed?

The Top 10 blogging neighborhoods, says Outside.In.com, are:

    Clinton Hill, Brooklyn

    Shaw, in Washington, DC

    Downtown L.A.

    Newton, Mass.

    Rogers Park/Northside Chicago

    Pearl District, Portland, Ore.

    Watertown, Mass.

    Harlem, NYC

    Portrero Hill, San Francisco

    Coconut Grove, Miami

Surprised?  I was.  I would have figured Silicon Valley would figure way up there, and it's not even in the Top 10 list.  Interesting that many of these neighborhoods are known more for poverty than for technology.

I went to Outside.In to learn more about their survey.  They claim to track blogs in 59 cities around the U.S.  I'm not sure about their methodology and criteria.  They say they tracked 3,000 blogs over the past six months.  As you well know, 3,000 is not even a drop in the bucket.

But the listing is fun to see.  Was your neighborhood left out?  Let them know.  I registered and told them about my zip code of 10017 -- home of Crain Communications (Advertising Age), Pfizer, the United Nations and,of course, Reich Communications, publisher of my 2 cents.

Speaking of blogging, click over to The Viral Garden, where Mack writes about the true size of the blogosphere.  Taking a closer look at Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, we keep hearing that there are 70+ million blogs out there.  Evidently, the number of active blogs is closer to 15.5 million. 

That's still a heckuva lot to read every day.

Comments

[Drew McLellan]

David,

Hmm, clearly there is a research flaw. Where the heck is Des Moines, the blogging capital of the free world?

We should probably just expose the research as a sham now, eh? :)

Drew McLellan
http://www.DrewsMarketingMinute.com

[David Reich]

Yeah, I wondered about Des Moines. Also, Cleveland, Dallas, Alabama, Philly and a few other locales I've come to know.

[Ann Handley]

Thanks for pointing me here, David. I would say that many of these neighborhoods USED to be poor... but are increasingly being gentrified, which I think was the correlation Outside.in drew. Other than that, not sure about methodology... but I agree wtih you. Whither Silicon Valley?