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.