Glad to be contributing to the stats here in The Hub, where, apparently, there are more bloggers per block than anywhere else on earth, including Silly-con Valley, as per this post to the Boston Globe's Daily Business Update. And happy to see our friend, David Weinberger, quoted, possibly the most quotable person I know:
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...
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."
