Which City Is the Bloggiest of Them All?

SHAW IS NOT the nation's second bloggiest neighborhood, despite prior reports to the contrary. But Washington is the nation's fourth bloggiest metropolitan area, with Boston coming in at No. 1, followed by Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Maybe.

How exactly do you determine the "blogginess" of an area? Well, "[i]t's all empirical science, really," blogging entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson said to a room full of giddy Brooklyn bloggers at the blog-heavy borough's second-ever blogfest. (How many times can you use "blog" in a sentence? That many.)

Johnson, whose OutsideIn.com has been trying to make sense of location-centric blogging, recently came out with rankings of the nation's bloggiest cities, following up a similar study of the nation's most blog-heavy neighborhoods. (Pictured here is one of Shaw's many bloggers, Jason Beard of TreeBoxVodka.)

Outside In tracked blogs in about 60 metropolitan areas in the United States, calculated how many blog posts were published by those blogs for a two-month period earlier this spring and then divided that number by the metro area's population to calculate something called a "blogginess quotient."

But at the May 10 Brooklyn blogger gathering, Johnson, a Bethesda native and author of "Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate" and "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software," admitted that his results weren't always entirely scientific. For example, D.C.'s Shaw neighborhood, ranked as the nation's second-bloggiest neighborhood, really came in behind Brooklyn's blog-heavy neighborhoods of Prospect Heights, Gowanus, Park Slope and Clinton Hill, which ranked No. 1.

So why alter the results?

"We needed to share the wealth," Johnson, at left, said at the time. His admission was greeted with laughter from the Brooklyn bloggers, who had packed into the historic Old Stone House in Park Slope. And what makes Brooklyn so special? Fervent fascination with real estate, intense interest in the controversial Atlantic Yards development and simple gripes, like Park Slope's corps of pram-pushing yuppies.

If you ask Pat Thibodeau, who started the comprehensive local blog portal DCBlogs.com, Dupont Circle has traditionally been the D.C. neighborhood with the most bloggers. But it's hard to tell with precision where a blogger is located based solely on a blog's content — especially when bloggers aren't writing exclusively about their home locality. According to Outside In, for example, Shaw is about 25 percent more bloggy than Logan Circle. But how can Outside In be sure which bloggers are in which areas? And where's the boundary between Logan and Shaw anyway? That question alone could spark a blog war.

So let's look at the bigger picture and the city rankings.

In an interview earlier this week, Johnson said that when Outside In ran its bloggiest cities numbers for the nation's capital, the results were somewhat surprising. "It's impressive D.C. is on the list as it is," he said. "We don't track political blogs. ... We're focused on civic-minded bloggers."

So if you were to include D.C.'s legion of politics bloggers, many of whom are more than happy to ignore local affairs, Washington would likely rank higher. So to increase D.C.'s overall blogginess, we need online scribes like John Aravosis of AmericaBlog to write more about his battles with the Metropolitan Police Department and The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias, at right, to chastise local waiters over the proper pronunciation of "bruschetta" at Italian restaurants in Dupont Circle — a gripe that was at the center of a pointless but memorable local blogging spat that took place before Jessica Cutler's Capitol Hill blogging sexcapades dominated D.C.'s blog interests. Sadly, Yglesias' offending bruschetta blog post has vanished from the public record.

Since those early days, D.C.'s blogscape, if there is such a thing, has expanded to a point where it's a mile wide and an inch deep. Long-term blog sustainability has waned. Looking back on the original group of locally focused bloggers, most grew tired of blogging or moved out of town, typical for a transient city such as ours. (This writer has been blogging about local affairs since 2003 in various places, including DCist.com, launched in 2004, and this site, which started up in 2006.)

Johnson says the challenges facing D.C.'s blog scene mirror what he's seen on a national level.

"You definitely see people burn out over time," Johnson said. "The question is whether there are people to replace them. ... If there are, that is a sign of health."

In the past year or so, some of D.C.'s most prolific local bloggers, El Guapo in D.C., First Date D.C., D.C. Direct Current, KathrynOn and Rock Creek Rambler, among others, have closed down shop for various reasons, including, in some cases, the kind of factional online warfare most of us haven't seen since middle school.

Nevertheless, if you look at DCBlogs.com, new local blogs are discovered daily, proving that D.C.'s blogginess quotient is indeed high, even if there is an overabundance of Carrie Bradshaw wannabes fruitlessly searching for love in our soulless capital. More importantly, neighborhood-focused blogs have found their place in the local online world, documenting street life, sorting through local gossip, discussing development and crime, battling churches and irksome advisory neighborhood commissioners (in the case of Shaw) and passing on various items of localized news. "The people living on the blocks are the real experts," Johnson said.

Indeed. If you're interested in checking out some local neighborhood-focused blogs, here are some that are particularly well done:

In Shaw (Shaw)
Off Seventh (Shaw)
Renew Shaw (Shaw)
Fifth and Oh (Shaw)
Bloomingdale (Bloomingdale)
Frozen Tropics (H Street NE, Near Northeast and Trinidad)
Stop Blog and Roll (Ward 5)
Penn Quarter Living (Gallery Place/Chinatown/Penn Quarter)
Silver Spring Scene (Silver Spring)
Silver Spring Singular (Silver Spring)
Just Up the Pike (Montgomery County; Its blogger, Dan Reed, is pictured at right)
Rethink College Park (College Park)
Prince of Petworth (Petworth)
Petworth News (Petworth)
Save Eastern Market (Eastern Market)

And there are, of course, many others.

All in all, blogginess rankings might be just as useful as all those studies from various number crunchers confirming that the D.C. area has some of the worst traffic in the nation. Washington is a city filled with intelligent people and aspiring writers who are often bored with their desk jobs and pass the time by either blogging or reading blogs.

So we'll be anxiously awaiting any research detailing the relationship between a city's blogginess quotient and work productivity. Now how exactly do you measure that?

Photos by Dayna Smith and Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post; Photo of Steven Berlin Johnson courtesy his Web site.