The Latest Must-Have for Yuppies?

The answer: “a blog about the neighborhood”, according to this report in the NYT:

First come the renovated condominiums, the latte bars and the expensive baby strollers. Next, apparently, come the bloggers.

One Web site’s survey of the prevalence of blogs in urban neighborhoods found a link between gentrification and the number of people who feel compelled to think out loud about the changes in their backyards. The site, Outside.in, crowned Clinton Hill in Brooklyn as the most blogged-about neighborhood in America.

Before the survey, the staff of Outside.in was “not conscious that local blogging would be so closely allied with gentrification,” said Steven Berlin Johnson, a founder of the site. Change, he said, “makes people particularly interested in every little development in their neighborhoods.”