Local blogs on Web hit parade
Newton in Top 10, as is Watertown
I will never again question the need for a column like this about local blogs. Or feel bad because, at times, it appears to be dominated by blogs from Newton and Watertown.
That's because The Garden City and H2Otown apparently dominate the local -- and even the national -- blogosphere quite well on their own without any boost from Cyberscenes, thank you very much.
At least that's what people think over at Outside.in , a website that aggregates blog postings and news at the city and neighborhood level.
In their just-released list of "America's Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods," Outside.in ranked Newton fourth and Watertown seventh. They were the only two communities in Massachusetts to make the list.
Clinton Hill, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., was ranked No. 1, followed by the District of Columbia's Shaw section and downtown Los Angeles.
The site, which says it tracks local bloggers in "over 3,000 neighborhoods," based its rankings on a number of criteria, including the total numbers of posts, total number of local bloggers, and total number of comments on postings made by blog readers.
Making the study both more interesting and more credible, Outside.in also included ratings from another blog-tracking site, Technorati, in its rankings calculation. Technorati says it tracks more than 75 million blogs worldwide and rates them by various measurements of relevance, including how many other blogs or sites link to them.
One thing that undermined the credibility of the Outside.In list, though, was the site's description of Newton: "Comprised of 13 villages that form a bedroom community of nearby Boston. Home to the various campuses of Boston College, Newton has graced the top of the FBI's annual 'Safest City' study for the last five years."
Actually, Newton topped the safest cities list for three years in a row, until this past year, when it slipped into fourth place. The safe cities list, meanwhile, is compiled by Morgan Quitno Press , an independent research and publishing company based in Kansas, not the FBI, although Morgan Quitno does use FBI crime data to put it together.
Oh, and Boston College's newest campus, made possible by a major land purchase from the Archdiocese of Boston a few years back, is in Brighton.
There is no doubt that Newton is a blogging powerhouse, though. Cyberscenes is tracking no less than 22 blogs that are based either wholly or in part in Newton, although the city did lose a major player recently when the anonymous blogger behind the Borderline blog retired his keyboard in January.
Cyberscenes tracks 16 Watertown blogs.
And yet I also suspect that Newton and Watertown's status as battleground cities for commercially generated news blogs also contributed to their high rankings.
Both the Newton Tab and the Watertown Tab weekly newspapers have highly active blogs, and last year the Globe launched Westword (now called Globe West Updates), its first suburban news blog , covering the area served by the newspaper's Globe West section. A search for either city on Outside.in comes up with scores of postings from both the Tab and Globe blogs.
The rankings have also touched off a raging debate at the local blog aggregator site Universal Hub (universalhub.com) , where bloggers in other cities were somewhat incredulous at the rankings. The skeptics include Universal Hub's creator, Adam Gaffin .
"Sorry, and no offense to folks in these two fine communities, but, just, no," Gaffin (who also covers local blogs for the Globe City Weekly section) wrote in a posting last week . "Cambridge has at least 90 blogs and Somerville 60 or so." 