Outside.in -- Gentrification Makes Neighborhood Bloggers Louder

Via Boing Boing, I discovered this neat service, outside.in.

The project manager, Stephen Berlin Johnson had this to say about the research from the goings on:

Since we've been tracking local blog posts by neighborhood for six months now, we figured it was about time we figured out exactly what the US's bloggiest neighborhoods were, given that this is the question every sensible person has been trying to find an answer to for years now.

What's interesting about the list we compiled is that it turns out placebloggers tend to thrive in gentrifying communities -- half of our nabes in the top ten were in the middle of some form of gentrification. makes sense, but it wasn't something we went into the project expecting to find.

I suppose that as myself, I am not surprised. My neighborhood of choice is Mill Avenue, and Mill is suffering from a very powerful case of gentrification. It's like a disease that wracks a body—the immune system rushes to the aid, but discovers no enemies to fight, just strange, new growth. A cancer. And so some of the elements, in this case the citizenry, fall to squinting into the sun and going through the motions.

With things that are familiar vanishing under the treads of bulldozers people begin with the light touches: they start talking about what it used to be like—how they wish it still was.

Today Vex on Mill Avenue Vexations brought up a lot of this stuff, observations of the old, the execrations into the new.

It's like Walt Richardson said, "There's a lot of changes, down on Mill Avenue." Oh, but those times are done changing.

For good or bad.

Technorati tags: mill avenue, vex harrow, gentrification, outside.in, boing boing