'Insider' Info Puts City Blogs on the Map
Aug 13, 2:04 PM (ET); By KENDRA LOCKE
NEW YORK (AP) - In Chicago, bloggers find out where the latest "Batman" movie is being filmed. In New York, they drool over pictures of steamed pork buns from a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown. And in Los Angeles, they joke about how the leavings of police cavalry might make Hollywood's streets smell even worse.
Locally focused group "metro" blogs - compilations of events, reflections, recommendations, news and complaints - are emerging to put a number of big cities in intimate, street-level relief.
"We're kind of that friend of yours that always knows what's happening in the city," said Jen Chung, editor-in-chief of the New York-based blog Gothamist.com, where she encouraged theatergoers this week to get out and see New York International Fringe Festival theater, passing along that "we hear that this is the first year that all the venues are air-conditioned - woo-hoo!"
Many blogs, like Gapersblock.com in Chicago and NewYorkish.com in New York, focus on just one metropolis. But this summer, a site called Metroblogging.com launched a network of blogs for major cities including Chicago, New York, San Francisco, London and Vienna.
Gothamist.com also expanded its base, setting up Chicagoist.com in early June and LAist.com in mid-July.
Like most blogs, neither Metroblogging.com nor Gothamist.com is making a profit - their owners work other full-time jobs, and their writers are unpaid.
But visit numbers to this new breed of Web journal are respectable if not huge. Gothamist.com averages more than 30,000 unique visitors daily, while blogging.la, the original Metroblogging.com blog, averages around 2,000. Compare that to Instapundit.com, one of the most popular blogs, averages nearly 140,000 daily visitors.
Given how new the sites are, they are doing well, said Scott Rafer, chief executive of Feedster Inc., a blog and Web site search engine. And because localized advertising from Google and Overture has grown substantially over the past six to nine months, local blogs even have the potential to be profitable, he said.
"Two thousand visitors a day who are interested in something about Chicago, or about New York, are probably going to be a lot more interesting to a prospective advertiser than 2,000 people who log into a blog for no apparent reason," said Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Chung said she has no plans to quit her advertising agency job in favor of the Gothamist. But she does earn enough from Google ads to at least buy a round of drinks for periodic Gothamist-hosted happy hours
Metroblogging.com owners Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo hope to eventually turn their idea into a profitable business as they expand to more cities - including Atlanta, Dublin, Miami, Paris, and Tokyo.
The inspiration for local group blogging may have originated from Gawker.com, a popular New York gossip blog.
Metroblogging.com, which originated as blogging.la, evolved in part out of a reaction to traditional event calendar and listing Web sites that offer readers only a limited feel for an area, Bonner and DeFillippo said.
They said the 10 to 20 bloggers contributing to each "metroblog" were chosen in order to create a diversity of tastes and opinions for local readers.
"We wanted to get local talent together to give a feel of different things going on that people don't really see," DeFillippo said.
Some bloggers said they prefer the more editorial tone of Gothamist.com, which, unlike Metroblogging.com, posts few personal anecdotes. Chung writes most of the blog's main posts, while other writers contribute to its sports, arts, weather and advice subsections.
The Gothamist also provides links to listing sites including Citysearch and Menupages, and to news publications like The New York Times and Time Out New York.
Matt Kingston, who moved to Manhattan last year, finds the Gothamist "helpful to get up to speed as to what's hip and what's going on in New York City."
Others are drawn to Metroblogging.com's variety. Shane Nickerson, a reality TV show producer in Los Angeles, finds the site reliable in part because its writers have had plenty of experience blogging on sites of their own.
"You can't read them all, so you just have to trust people's voices and opinions," Nickerson said. "As long as they have good people contributing, each site is going to be cool."
Of course, local group blogs cannot match resources like Citysearch.com or a newspaper's online metro section when you're seeking comprehensive restaurant reviews or concert listings.
But the individual voices of local residents may offer a level of authenticity missing elsewhere.
"You basically can't hire people to do that. You have to get them to volunteer their time to do that," Rafer said.
apnews.myway.com |
