Watertown is #7 on a list of “Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods” acoording to outside.in (via Jason and Fred). Also on the list at #5 is Newton, just across the river from H2otown. The details on how the number is calculated only states that it depends on the “total number of posts, total number of local bloggers, number of comments and Technorati ranking for the bloggers”.

Much of that bloggy juice is due to Lisa Williams who runs H2otown, the great placeblog for Watertown (that just received a redesign), and Placeblogger that aggregates placeblogs. She posted a list of the top 10 individual placeblogs in January.

I’m really excited about the state of the local web improving, and these are useful experiments. As a consumer they certainly make it simpler to read more about what is going on in your town from different perspectives, if you live in certain areas. [1] As a producer, there seems to be some gaps. While there are many blogs that are 100% placeblogs, or even a whole community site, there is a lot of mixed content blogs (like this one). Some posts are local, others are not. Both sites seem geared toward marking an entire blog as being about a specific place. Outside.in does have a Feedburner flare that lets you tag a specific post but I would prefer to give them a specific feed for each locale I blog about than re-tag each post on their site. (I want to centralize my metadata.) Outside.in gets points for allowing marking stories with multiple locations or a specific street address. Perhaps I am jumping the gun, as outside.in recently updated things (and improved the UI) which I haven’t experimented much with yet. If I’m impatient it is only because this is such a gaping hole in the web today.

Notes: [1] This feels like yet another case of newspapers actually have great content and failing to make it accessible. For example, the Boston Globe has lots of information on what is happening in Watertown, but there is no RSS feed, comments or a way to even find it unless you specifically went searching for it.

An attempt to be less literal with a few shots, this one of the Charles River.

Living in 2007 means it is past time for good manners to instill a respect for those who time shift tv. Tivo, DVRs and their VCR ancestors means that time shifting has been possible for over twenty years and yet common etiquette has not caught up. Proper politeness should now dictate that one should not assume that two separated tv viewers are synchronized in the event’s timeline. Just as it would be rude to start a conversation about The Sixth Sense saying, “Can you believe that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time?” before asking if they have seen the movie, the same should apply to tv. For example, when one is watching the Red Sox delayed as they sweep the Yankees, it is a wee bit of a spoiler to leave an excited voicemail about the 4 back-to-back homeruns the Sox hit, as thrilling as it was. (This is why I am now so wary of answering my phone during sporting events.)

For those who don’t own a DVR, I’m sorry you have yet to see the light. Here’s the deal I’ll make: if you don’t spoil my Red Sox and Patriots’ games and plots twists for shows I’m behind on then I will keep the DVR proselytizing to a minimum. I will bite my tongue not to mention the life changing benefits in this 2nd golden age of tv or describe the perfect feel of the Tivo Series 3 remote in one’s hand. The way you feel like a dual-tuner HD god with little OLED stars blinking back at you. Ok, starting now.

The Boston Globe has a piece on the proposal by owner Patrick Lyons to transform Avalon and Axis into a “modern entertainment complex”. Lansdowne Street, in the shadow of Fenway Park’s Green Monster, has been home to a lot of great music over the years and the facelift looks to include popular and fine dining in addition to performance space. I can’t disagree that the area has always felt a little desolate with a lack of parking and few places to eat (without walking into Kenmore or to the otherside of Fenway), and this is part of an effort to make the Fenway area more like Wrigleyville in Chicago. The new establishment, tentatively called “Lansdowne Street Music Hall”, would hold 2,500 people compared to Avalon’s 2,100 and Axis’ 1,100 capacity today.

1/29/08 Update: The Lansdowne Street Music Hall has been sold to the House of Blues. Patrick Lyons, who is selling the Lansdowne clubs, had co-founded the first House of Blues club in 1992 in Harvard Square.

When I read Google’s web hsitory announcement, which remembers every page you browse through the Google Toolbar, my first reaction was that it could be helpful to tracking down something I’d seen before. Then, I wondered about what it would mean for my privacy if they knew everything I’ve read until I started thinking about what they already know (or at least could):

• Gmail - All the emails I’ve sent and received in the last 3 odd years, and chats I’ve had through Gmail or Google Talk.
• Search History - Through the Firefox search history and a personalized startpage they know what I’ve searched for. They should also be able to tell that I can’t spell because I use Google as a spell checker and quick dictionary through their define: some-fancy-word searches.
• Reader - All the many blogs I try to keep up with.
• Google Calendar - They know where I spend my time and who with in meatspace too. Likely not very juicy - maybe I should add entries “Clubbing with B. Spears & L. Lohan”?
• Checkout - Having purchased something through Google Checkout they know my credit card info and where I live. I do trust Google completely with my credit card info because they don’t need my money since they have a machine that generates it for them.
• Maps - Getting to our place has a couple tricky, unmarked turns (this being Massachusetts after all) and having played air traffic controller for visiting guests, I made a map of directions using their new “my maps” feature in Google Maps.
• Analytics - Measures the traffic of my blog and another site I co-manage, tourb.us, with a lot more graphs and relationships that I can even truly use.
• Google Desktop - For finding documents and non-gmail emails I’ve run Google Desktop, which could send all sorts of things back to the mothership.
• Docs - I’m impressed with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and have started using it for my limited document writing needs. Yet another place for the GOOG to mine for nuggets of tasty, tasty data.
• Mobile apps, Video, Google Apps for Your Domain, Google Earth, Picasa, Google Groups, etc., etc.. The list is long.

When I see stories about Google moving to fake form submissions to search the “deep web” or the concerns around the acquisition of DoubleClick I think I should throw in the privacy towel. Just give in and tell Google who I had a crush on in 8th grade, hand over some embarrassing photos from college and fork over my dental records and hope they stay non-evil.