I meant to do a post about this when I found it a while back. Downtown Pittsburgh, now has at least one resident blogger with a blog about life downtown. It’s not too active, but it does help show some signs of life.

About a year and a half ago, I found this amazing website called Detroit Yes!The site was obviously founded as a labor of love by people eager to document what was left of their city and it quickly became a place for people to talk about their memories of Detroit and what they can do to make the city great again. For a while I was on the Detroit Yes forums a lot, they seemed to be a place where the huge Detroit diaspora could meet to talk about the city. A lot of the people posting and commenting no longer lived in the area, but they were eager to share the things they learned by living in other places.

“The DetroitYES project began with the 1996 launch of the “Fabulous Ruins of Detroit” tour.This guided tour of the contemporary ruins of Detroit is accompanied by brief notes which, woven together, tell the story of precipitous decline and agonizing path of the great city of Detroit in the late 20th Century.

Along away the visitor will discover a snapshot of the ruins of Detroit in the mid 1990’s meant to stimulate and energize discussion of the questions, “What went wrong?” and “Where to do we go from Here?”

The “Classic Tour” forms the core of the DetroitYES project, an endeavor that has grown to over 2000 pages and has become home the most active forum for the discussion of Detroit, its problems and its promise -
The Discuss Detroit Forum.

You are invited and encouraged to share your memories, questions and observations with the millions who now visit this site and participate its discussion forums.”

I meant to do this post a few weeks ago about Outside in and USA Today ranking us as the third “bloggiest”, city in America. I think recording blogs by geographic area is pretty recent, but the stats ring true. Pittsburgh clearly has a lot of serious, smart bloggers and I think they are starting to have an impact on the city’s culture. The number of good stuff is way too much for me to read.

“Well, the figures represent the total number of place-based blog posts in March and April per 100,000 residents in the cities’ metro areas. So to arrive at this list we just took the total number of place-based blog posts in a city’s metro area, and divided by the
number of people living in that area.”

It seems like a few people are a bit upset about this, like David in Manhattan.

“Wow. I am really upset. I understand why Boston is ranked #1. And I’m OK with it. Really. But for New York City to be #6, well, that’s just embarassing! With all due respect to Philly, Pittsburg (Pittsburgh?), D.C., and Portland (OK, I get Portland), but NYC #6? Can we find out how Manhattan ranks? I think that would be more fair.

I say we have a contest. You know us New Yorkers. We’re very competitive!
(Disclaimer: some of my best friends are from Pittsburgh.)(Oh, and I suspect I’ve offended several million people. My apologies. But can we look into the Manhattan thing?)”

“1. The demographics of a city’s metro area strongly shape its blogginess quotient. Cities like New York may have areas, like Brooklyn, that are very blog-dense, but if they also have big areas where blogs are sparse (like the Bronx), that will lower their overall post-to-resident ratio, making them less-bloggy cities. Chicago, Los Angeles and New York all scored lower on the list for this reason – they had lots and lots of local blog posts, but the sheer number of people living in those areas blew that number away. If your metro area has 19 million people in it, you’ve got to do a lot of blogging to get on the bloggiest cities list.”

“2. Blogginess in a city is reflective of growth, civic activism, and a writerly population. Boston, as the bloggiest city, has a hot economy, is notorious for local political activism, and has a university every other block, which all combine to push it’s post-to-resident ratio up-up-up.”

Learning About Online Marketing

Originally uploaded by gophotogo

Today I am participating in a conference about online marketing. I am talking about how businesses can use blogging. There are some amazing presenters here. If you want to follow along they are live blogging the entire day – www.marketingconference.org/blog

If you’ve ever looked at Google Maps’s top-down view and wished you could actually see what a certain location looked like to normal people (and not astronauts), your wish was recently granted by Google Street View. That is, if you live in a city that isn’t Pittsburgh.

That’s all about to change.

Google’s camera cars are spidering their way through Pittsburgh right now. The photograph, above, is what the cars look like. If you see one in your immediate area, try to keep your pants on. Or, if you’re not wearing pants, try to keep your tops on. Also, make sure you wait a few days to dry your laundry, get your hardcopy porn on, get in a fistfight, commit a burglary or spy on your neighbors.

You’ll thank me later, when people like these folks start scrutinizing us.

No, this is not another post about Al Gore and the Live Earth Concerts. This is about Al Gore III who has also been in the news recently for being arrested on July 4 for speeding in his Prius and for drug possession. I am not really interested in criticizing Al Gore or his family over this incident. The Gore family has some issues to work through. But I do want to share this related article because it is pretty funny.
It turns out that about 50 people made some money off of this arrest. OnlineCasinoNews.com reports that Paddy Power, an online Irish betting website had been running a promotion about which high profile American would be the next to be arrested.

The Irish bookmaker offered odds of 14-to-one that ‘Al Gore’ would be the next high-profile American to be arrested but did not specify which ‘Al Gore’ it meant. In a bizarre coincidence that could cost the Dublin-based firm up to $13,600, the former American Presidential candidate’s son, Albert ‘Al’ Gore III, was arrested last week for drugs possession after being stopped for speeding in California.

Ireland’s largest bookmaker said that some 50 people had placed money on the long shot and have been quick to claim their winnings.

‘We got a good stoning thanks to the Vice-President’s son,’ said the company in a statement.

I also learned from this article on OnlineCasinoNews.com that Al Gore III is the associate publisher of a magazine “Good” which is targeted at getting young people involved in philanthropy. Interesting.

The entire Metroblog system is a little under the weather today. Just wanted to let you know we know there is a problem and the Metroblog gurus are working on it. You may have some issues posting comments.
Hopefully we will be back and working soon.

I am uploading another powerpoint presentation to Slideshare.net, which is a super cool too that lets you share presentations online. SlideShare is kind of like YouTube for powerpoints – they host the powerpoint and you can take a little line of code and embed it in to your blog.
I get to test out lots of online tools like SlideShare, so I was thinking I should write a blog to share my reviews. But I have am stuck on a name. A name defines so much. How did you name your blog? What is the best blog name you have ever seen? What is the worst blog name ever? Anyone have any cools names for a website about blog tools?

3 of Pittsburgh’s top and in my opinion best bloggers have formed a new blogging project – The Pittsburgh Women’s Blogging Society. I think the idea for the PWBS came out of a discussion on the RunBabyRun list serve, but these women rock.
The Pittsburgh Women’s Blogging Society’s founding members are
Sue – Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondent
Maria – 2 Political Junkies
Agent Ska – The Ideas Bucket

Sue, Maria and Agent Ska have been providing Pittsburgh excellent coverage of local politics and together they are a force to be reckoned with.

They are looking for other women bloggers to include – stop by and leave your suggestions. PittGirl - I really hope you will participate.