So the New York Times just discovered neighborhood blogging. Obviously they got wind of Outside.in’s survey that Brooklyn is the Bloggiest. Now the Times’ pipes in with a sligthly snarky come on:  "First come the renovated condominiums, the latte bars and the expensive baby strollers. Next, apparently, come the bloggers." 

One
Web site’s survey of the prevalence of blogs in urban neighborhoods
found a link between gentrification and the number of people who feel
compelled to think out loud about the changes in their backyards. The
site, Outside.in, crowned Clinton Hill in Brooklyn as the most
blogged-about neighborhood in America.

Also on the top 10 list
were Harlem; Shaw in Washington; downtown Los Angeles; Newton, Mass.;
and Rogers Park/North Howard in Chicago.

Before the survey, the
staff of Outside.in was “not conscious that local blogging would be so
closely allied with gentrification,” said Steven Berlin Johnson, a
founder of the site. Change, he said, “makes people particularly
interested in every little development in their neighborhoods.”

Outside.in
was introduced in February as a collector of local news and blog posts,
covering about 3,000 neighborhoods in more than 60 cities. It described
Clinton Hill as a place with “rapidly gentrifying tree-lined blocks of
19th-century townhouses” and said that the neighborhood’s leading blog
was Brownstoner.com.

In
determining the top 10 list, “We approached it statistically from a
couple of angles, and then took a little bit of editorial license,”
said Mr. Johnson. The latter, he said, included a decree that the list
could contain only one neighborhood in Brooklyn, a borough that seems
to have a rather high blogger density. The whole staff of Outside.in
lives and works in Brooklyn, said Mr. Johnson, a resident of Park Slope.

In
Clinton Hill, Jonathan Butler, the publisher of Brownstoner, did not
take his blogging title too seriously. “This either means we’ve got a
lot of creative, community-minded people in the neighborhood or a lot
of recluses with too much time on their hands,” he wrote in an e-mail
message. MARIA ASPAN