Home of the bean and the blog

Boston has long been viewed as the land of the bean and the cod -- and now the Hub may also be the land of the blog.

According to OutsideIn.com, a website that tracks neighborhood blogging, Boston was the "bloggiest city" in America for the two-month period it examined, March and April.

Behind Boston were Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.

OutsideIn.com said it tracks blogging activity in about 60 urban areas. It based its rankings on a "blogging quotient" that factored in a metropolitan area's population with the number of blog posts tied to specific locations.

By that measure, Greater Boston had 89 posts per 100,000 residents, edging out Greater Philadelphia, which had 88 posts.

Surprisingly, perhaps, such well-wired places as San Francisco and Seattle were farther down the list.

Why was Greater Boston number one? Outsidein.com's 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 vent their opinions.

Blogs are such a new phenomenon that methods for tracking them are still in the early stages, said David Weinberger, a Boston-area blogger and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

And in seeking to pinpoint blogging hotbeds, he said, raw numbers may not tell the whole story; the quality of the content and whether blog posts help build a community are also relevant.

Still, Weinberger said, "I'm proud to live in the bloggiest city in the universe."

Outsidein.com is focused on neighborhoods, and its business model is to attract advertising dollars from neigh borhood merchants as well as from national businesses looking to target ads by ZIP codes, Johnson said.

Shortly after its launch last year, Outsidein.com examined blogging activity by neighborhood.

Watertown and Newton ranked high, but Clinton Hill, in Brooklyn, N.Y., was the bloggiest neighborhood, Johnson said.

A neighborhood undergoing gentrification is often fertile territory for location-specific blogs, and not only is Brooklyn gentrifying, it's filled with people who either "write for a living or who want to write for a living," Johnson said.

Jon Petitt edits Bostonist.com, a blog about all things Boston, and he said that March and April were especially busy for local bloggers.

Sports is a popular local blog topic, he noted, and just when Outsidein.com was taking its snapshot of blogging activity, Greater Boston was obsessing on Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Japanese star pitcher who left his homeland to play baseball for the Red Sox.

During the spring, "all eyes were on Dice-K," said Petitt, and local blog posts ran high.

So Greater Boston may partly owe its current blogging title to its baseball team, said Petitt, who added, "The Sox may have given us the edge on that one."

Chris Reidy can be reached at reidy@globe.com.