Virtual neighbors

Our traditional idea of neighborhood is so last millennium.

My dictionary defines it as ''the area or region around or near some place or thing; vicinity."

There are, to be sure, plenty of places in Boston where physical proximity still has meaning, where men wear silly hats and ruin perfectly good ribs on grills at block parties and women wipe the noses of each other's kids the way folks did back when Cousy graced the parquet at the Garden.

But, for better or worse, urban neighborhoods are losing their geographic salience. Blame it on the way we live today. People leave early and come home late. They bring work with them. They're gym rats. They blow town on weekends.

Hairline fractures in established communities continue to multiply. I remember a Little League coach in Southie telling me a few years ago that he passed the hat in the stands in the fourth inning rather than the first because the days were long gone when working parents could make it for the starting pitch at 5:30.

New communities -- I'll call them Neighborhoods Without Borders -- hatch like tadpoles. They materialize at the office and on elliptical machines, at the Brattle and on the Charles, in chat rooms and the blogosphere. They surface among truffle addicts, Billy Collins fans, and Truffaut acolytes. What's rare these days is to find someone at the door from across the street asking to borrow some balsamic vinegar.

Which brings me to a meeting of a nascent group called Boston Media Makers last Sunday morning at Sweet Finnish, a bakery in Jamaica Plain.

Steve Garfield, an independent video producer, dreamed up the name and the idea of assembling video bloggers on a regular basis to palaver about their passion. Michael Oh, the WiFi wizard from Tech Superpowers, was also on hand to field technical questions.

Welcome to the 'hood circa 2006.

(Blogging has been around for ages, as have videos shot with digital cameras. What's fresh -- a few years old in common use, according to Garfield -- is the cross-cultural marriage of the two mediums.)

Garfield, who has 32 blogs of his own, is the moving force behind ''vlogging" in Boston. (That's one ugly collision of consonants.) More than 30 people showed up for the first one in late January. Since then he has featured individual vloggers at the weekly confabs at Sweet Finnish.

The flavor of last week was Amy Carpenter, a 32-year-old artist who discovered the pursuit a year ago and is now a true believer.

For years, she viewed a computer the way she did a stove. Then she began to experiment with an inexpensive Sony video camera. Her creative juices started flowing and she became a vlogging warrior. (I rather like ''vlogette.")

Her credo: ''We use video blogging to spread the viral plague of joy."

''Viral" appears to be the Rosetta Stone of the blogging vocabulary.

Carpenter continues her ancient family tradition of eating by working for rock promoters at places such as Avalon. She posts her paintings on her website and asks, ''What gallery is going to get me [$]26,000 a year and not take a cut?" She created a vlog called the Super Secret Dance Society and got 9,000 hits from London to Texas in a month.

This little event had a certain ''Martian Chronicles" quality for the Observer, who could house in a cigar box what I have in common with these people. But then I live for eye-openers.

The half-dozen people assembled in turn tolerated my intrusion, although Carpenter politely told me the next day that my presence ruined the natural flow of ideas. The experience thus conformed to the scientific principle that holds the mere observation of a phenomenon changes it.

I was delighted nonetheless to watch virtual acquaintances quit their screens to make flesh and blood connections. It's always nice to visit Planet Earth.

Open another Carpenter vlog and you'll find ''Welcome to Amyville. You are now my neighbor." On it are a bunch of short videos, primitive stuff notable for their relentless narcissism. Some are funny. Others resemble things you wrote when you were 16 and then destroyed.

''Travolta Travolta" is a fabulous monologue she delivers to the camera about her intention to name all of her children, should she have any, Travolta.

''Why Not," in contrast, is a soporific study, primarily of her knuckles at close range, while she drinks a cup of coffee.

That's the thing about video blogging. Just because you do it doesn't make it good. There is a lot of dreck in the blogosphere. We all need editors.

Vloggers spend vast amounts of time filming themselves. This penchant mirrors the insistence among countless bloggers to tell us, without being asked, what they think about almost everything.

I'm guessing they're steamed that no one in the outside world solicits their opinions.

That said, Garfield is leading Carpenter and her tribe on a steep learning curve. They're creative people who are only warming up. Another subculture has just hatched. The plot thickens.

''It's all performance," says Carpenter.

Sam Allis can be reached at allisd@globe.com