Blogs In vs. Blogs About Cities

So far I've focused on my creative (or trendy) impulse to write a blog about urban planning, but lately I've been wondering if there's actually any demand for a blog about urban issues. I searched around and came up with a wider range of blogs than I might have guessed, including the apparent obsession of a young Chicago industrial designer, Fueled by Coffee, ranging to a website extolling "free-market environmentalism".

There is of course also a distinction to be made between blogs about cities, and blogging in cities. If I put in a search for the blogs of young, hyper-self-aware urban dwellers, I'd probably have search results coming out of my ears.

There are a number of interesting urban blog nodes that I need to investigate, including Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity, a title which summarizes my feelings exactly about the state of urban planning. Well, at least the second part. As I find more interesting blogs, they'll appear on the right-hand column of links, and I'll probably use this space to comment.

I've also been considering the question of what a blog can do, that other more traditional forms of media can't do. At the moment, I think of this blog as a filter for the disparate kinds of articles on the Internet relevant to cities.