Visual Lingual

A neighbor of ours has a great post today about choosing her environment. I definitely feel affinity for her decision process. My life, where I live and how, is made from innumerable small steps and everyday decisions. It was not planned out in advance, but the result is pretty good. Read her post.

Buzzfeed

Traffic on this site skyrocketed over the past few days, and it appears to be generated by a site called Buzzfeed, that has linked to the Obama vs. Huckabee Christmas card post. Weird.

I guess I'll be reading Buzzfeed more, they seem to know the good sites.

Localvore or Locavore

I recently read, that the word Locavore, was voted the best new word or 2007. I think the origination of the term is "eating food that is grown locally". I agree with that sentiment, but also try to support local hardware stores and shops too.

However, it is definitely possible to go over-board with this sentiment. For example, we bought a car a few years ago, partially because the dealer is within walking distance.

....we should have read Consumer Reports first.

Anyway, I would like to coin a new word: Locablog.

1,000 Visitors

In September, I put a counter on this site (Google Analytics), and today I passed 1,000 unique viewers. There have been 2,400 total visits and 4,300 pageviews. I think 1,000 viewers in 3 months, is pretty good for a site that is ultra-local and non-political.

In September I usually had 30 unique viewers per day. A few days ago, I had 130 in one day. My highest traffic day is typically Monday, the lowest Sunday.

Of course there are more readers on the days when the posts are interesting, not just filler. And I have more than just visitors. I have gotten to know a few people in-person or via email through contact at this site, and that is pretty neat too.

I don't see other bloggers post about their traffic much at all. Is it bad manners or something?

Virtual Neighbors Support Real Neighborhood

Here is a mind-expanding excerpt from a book about the intersection between virtual neighborhoods and good local neighborhoods. There are some good observations here. Consider the quote below:

A tenet of modernist planning was that cities didn’t matter any more, that communications technology ... rendered them useless and inefficient. Of course, the opposite has proved true. As technology has lowered the barriers between places, the differences between them have become accentuated. At least at a global scale, when ideas and capital flow freely, they tend to dry up in some places and pool in others—as in New York. But the influence of communication technology is beginning to have an impact at the neighborhood scale as well. Jacobs wrote that “word does not move around where public characters and sidewalk life are lacking.” Now it does. There are the people paused at the top of the subway stairs, occupying two spaces at once, one physical, one virtual. And in neighborhoods around the country—this one in particular—community online message boards and blogs are thriving, entirely in parallel with news passed stoop to stoop.
...
If the physical form of a neighborhood is conducive to community, so is its virtual form.

Interesting thesis, but is it true? I defintely think that a city with good physical form helps foster community. And I understand that virtual communities are more active in vibrant neighborhoods or ones in transistion or with many stresses. For example, people may go online to organize block watches or to organize to save the local pool.