stevenberlinjohnson.com

The Department Of Blogiology Strikes Again

We couldn't help ourselves -- it was so fun calculating America's bloggiest neighborhoods, we had to go on and do the math on America's bloggiest cities, which led to my very first role in creating a USA Today infographic.

My colleague John Geraci does an excellent job explaining the results on the outside.in blog.

Live SBJ

I'm doing a little long overdue maintenance on the blog and the first change you'll see in the sidebar here: a list  of all my upcoming public appearances.

Coming next: links to all my non-FEED writing since the late 90s.

And maybe after that, fingers crossed, the complete FEED archives restored.

This Is Cool

From a new interview in the Seattle Times with William Gibson:

Q. What books have you read lately that you can recommend?

"The Ghost Map" by Steven Johnson, about a London cholera epidemic.

I still get a little thrill when I hear that people like William Gibson are actually taking the time to sit around and read one of my books. I mean, Neuromancer was on my orals reading list when I was in grad school at Columbia. Now if I can just get Pynchon to plug Everything Bad I can die happy.

Outside.in: Not Just For Placebloggers Anymore

Ever since our original alpha launch last fall, the content at outside.in has been primarily made up of two sources: links to blog posts from regular placebloggers writing about their local communities, and links to other local news submitted to the site directly by users or freelancers on our payroll. But we've always known that there was an important group we were missing with this system: bloggers who write occasionally about places around them, but not exclusively. We're currently tracking over 2,000 regular placebloggers around the U.S., but the number of bloggers who have posted, from time to time, locally-relevant information is probably orders of magnitude larger.

It's true that you have always been able to submit an individual blog post as a suggested link, and so some of that part-time placeblogger content has appeared on outside.in in the past. But today we're making it far easier for those bloggers to share their location-based posts with the outside.in community. All you have to do is submit your blog URL using this form (assuming you're a registered neighbor), and then tag your posts with any of the four supported geo-tags described here: GMAP links, zipcode categories, the "Where" tag, or GeoRSS.

I've been using this system with my own blog for the past few weeks and it really works great. This post from earlier this week about Coney Island included a GMAP link to Coney Island's address in the body of the post. After an hour or two, it automatically showed up on outside.in, as a recent link for Brooklyn, for the Coney Island zip code, for the Coney Island neighborhood page, and even on the Place page for Coney Island itself. The end result is that my thoughts about Coney Island get introduced to a wider audience, and get captured in a geocoded format that will make them relevant months from now anytime someone is looking for information about that part of the world. And if you write about specific locations, you'll see your posts encoded on one of our cool new maps -- showing not only the places you've blogged about, but also the surrounding conversation (from elsewhere in the blogosphere or traditional media) about each of those places.

So if you've got a blog and got something to say about the world around you, sign up and start sharing. We can't wait to hear from you....