A few weeks back the people at outside.in posted a list of America's Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods. Here's the list of neighborhoods with the highest concentration of bloggers based on their tracking of over 3,000 US neighborhoods over the last six months with a sample, local blogger from each:

1. Clinton Hill, Brooklyn - Brownstoner
2. Shaw, DC - Remaking le Slum Historique
3. Downtown LA - blogdowntown
4. Newton, Mass - The Garden City
5. Rogers Park/North Howard Chicago - Howard Watchers
6. Pearl District ("The Pearl"), Portland - Neighborhood Notes
7. Watertown, Mass - H2otown
8. Harlem, NY - UPTOWNflavor
9. Potrero Hill, SF - Potrero Hill, San Francisco
10. Coconut Grove ("The Grove"), FL - Coconut Grove Grapevine

I wasn't surprised by which neighborhoods I knew that showed up on the list. Pearl District and Potrero Hill are both home to large number of young, relatively affluent, computer-savvy folks, but it's exciting to see them blogging about their "physical" neighborhoods. Instead of using the internet to form communities based solely on niche interests (like putting stuff on their cats or muzzle loading rifles), they are forming virtual communities with their real-world neighbors, great stuff! I didn't see any Berkeley neighborhoods in the top ten list, but if you look around a bit you'll find hyper-local sites like the Camelia Street Blog which is focused on West Berkeley (Clear Ink's hood) or the Willard Park Blog (shameless plug) that I started last month on the other side of town. If you want to see what people are blogging about in your neighborhood, look on outside.in, feedmap, Placeblogger or just knock on your neighbor's front door and ask them if they are secretly a blogger.

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Virtual Community Development Series: Discussion 1

Clear Ink Island recently hosted a Community Development Discussion with Lys Ware (formerly Henrik Linden), Project Manager for the L2 Research Project at Stanford University.

Throughout the design development of our new Clear Ink Island installation, we talked about our hope that it would become a place where virtual community could thrive. However, building that community requires so much more than architecture and talk. But what, exactly, does it take to actually foster and sustain virtual community in a meaningful way?

Since community development is a topic of special interest to many people and businesses in Second Life, we decided to make this discussion public, and host a discussion series. Though not advertised, the event was well attended, and we received lots of positive feedback and ideas for future discussions.

Stay tuned for more info about our next Clear Ink Community Development discussion! Transcript of this event is attached.