Blogs

We’re very pleased to announce that Cate Corcoran is starting today as Managing Editor at Brownstoner. In addition to having been an active member of the Brownstoner community for years, Cate has written about technology, fashion, culture, and business for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Women’s Wear Daily, Salon, and The Wall Street Journal. She taught a class on social media at New York University, and has worked as a cool hunter identifying trends on the street in New York for Outlaw Consulting. She moved to Brooklyn in 2001, where she is restoring an 1890s wood frame house. Welcome!

Over on Atlantic Yards Report this morning, in a post called Blogfest Meets Shillfest, Norman Oder reports on last night’s Brooklyn Blogfest at the Brooklyn Lyceum, an event we were boycotting on principle. In its first couple of years, though rather disorganized, the motley gathering had some charm to it. Based on Oder’s report, though, it sounds like it’s run its course. We decided weeks ago not to attend, because it was becoming clear to us that that the event’s organizer and some of the other participating bloggers had completely sold out to the evening’s sponsor, Absolut, which was using the blogfest to launch its new Spike Lee-branded line of vodka. (From AYR: “I’m not going to get into gentrification, but goddamn,” [Lee] said, musing about “white linen tables” on Lafayette and DeKalb avenues. Then he corrected himself: “This is to celebrate Absolut, so we’re not going to get into gentrification tonight. Sorry, Absolut.”) An email we received a few weeks ago (posted in full on the jump) described a program whereby bloggers would be given a Flip video camera and some other Absolut swag in return for blogging and tweeting about the new brand of vodka. A number have done so and we’ve yet to see a single instance of disclosure; nor has the event’s organizer, Louise Crawford of Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, been forthcoming about the backroom deals. (Here‘s where she should have mentioned the payola deal.) This wasn’t just a matter of a company donating some booze and getting to hang their banner in return; there’s nothing underhanded about that. It was a full-fledged sell-out with paid-for but undisclosed editorial pimping. We’re certainly in favor of bloggers finding innovative ways to get compensated for all the hard work it takes to maintain a blog, but in order to maintain any credibility they need to be transparent about who’s buttering their bread; readers can be a pretty understanding bunch as long as they believe you’re being straight with them. Based on the play-by-play on Atlantic Yards Report, the night ended up being much more about promoting Absolut than about blogging. Here’s how Sunset Park Chronicle described it in a tweet: “brooklyn blogfest–the creative unite…or become captive audience for spike lee’s absolute vodka fest. Weird.” And here’s another disgusted tweet. Norman Oder has posted a question to Crawford on the New York Times, where’s she’s featured this week in a piece called “Ask The Brooklyn Blogger.” It’ll be interesting to see how she responds. Update: Louise Crawford has published a post addressing the Absolut sponsorship issue. Like a few others in this thread, she is either misconstruing or purposefully obfuscating the core of our criticism: We’re not against sponsorship or advertising (obviously, given that it’s how we make our living), but we are against promotional blog posts and tweets for remuneration that are not identified as such. (more…)

We’re less than a hundred away from having 3,000 followers on Twitter. If that’s how you roll, we’d be mighty obliged if you’d care to follow us.

Big news around Brownstoner HQ: After many months of planning, Brownstoner Philadelphia launches this morning. With its incredible architectural history and passionate residents, Philly has the two key ingredients for a successful Brownstoner community. With Gabby Warshawer, a three-year veteran of Brownstoner Brooklyn, at the helm and a handful of local contributors in place, we hope to do exciting things in the City of Brotherly Love. We urge you to check out the site and, please, take a minute to shoot an email to your friends and family in the area.

In related news, you may notice that things look a little different around here. With the help of the crack team at Six Apart, we’re pleased to debut an updated look for Brownstoner. Not too much has changed: The headlines are a little bigger, we’ve added some shortcuts for spreading stories via Twitter and Facebook, and we’ve tried to bring the neighborhood archives into greater prominence.

In the future, we hope to start having some overlap between the Philly and Brooklyn sites where appropriate. Most importantly, we plan to introduce a shared Forum, where posts that are not geographically specific can share feedback. At some point, the renovation blogs may be co-mingled too.

We look forward to your feedback on both sites. Please kick the tires and let us know if you see any problems. Thanks for playing.

Mr. B

Our long-awaited new t-shirt design just arrived from the printer. They are going to be available this Sunday at The Flea from 12:30-2 at the main information booth right when you walk in. They’re American Apparel so they run a little on the small side but they are great quality. They’ll be $15 a pop, and we have all adult sizes and some kids sizes as well. Hope to see you Sunday.

Just a reminder that we started an email service this week that delivers the day’s headlines to your inbox every afternoon. Whether you’re a regular reader or an infrequent visitor, it’s a good way to make sure you don’t miss anything. You can sign up above or by clicking here.

Sharp-eyed readers may have notice the appearance of a sign-up box for a daily email in the upper right corner of the page in the last day. That’s because we’ve just launched a Daily email alert for readers who want to make sure they don’t miss anything. It’s pretty simple: Towards the end of the afternoon every day, you’ll receive an email with the day’s headlines that you can click if you want to read the full post. Hopefully some time soon we’ll add weekly email summaries by neighborhood.

We only need 20 more Twitter followers to reach 2,000. Who’s going to be number 2,000? You can follow us here. And the winner is…Brian McAllister!

This podcast interview we did a few days ago just went up on the Housing Helix.

We’ve owed you some results since we ran our latest reader survey a couple of weeks ago. Basically, there was very little difference between the results of the recent survey and the one we conducted back in 2007, but it’s still fun to look at.
  – 45% have been reading since before 2007
  – 80% check the site at least once a day
  – 45% check the site several times a day or more
  – Male/female split was exactly 50/50
  – 46% are in their 30s, 25% are in their 40s
  – More than 95% have a college degree or higher
  – Bankers and lawyers were the two highest-represented professions
  – More than 60% work in Manhattan
  – 70% make at least $100,000 per year
  – 90% live in Brooklyn, 4% in Manhattan
  – 20% of Brooklyn dwellers in Park Slope
  – 59% own their own place: 53% houses, 26% co-ops, 21% condos
  – 50% of renters planning to buy within next two years
  – 74% of owners have fixed rate mortgages, 11% have none at all
  – 30% think the Brooklyn market has already bottomed
  – 50% think the market will bottom at some point in the next year
  – Park Slope most favored nabe for investment over next 3-5 years
  – 58% of home owners spend at least $2,500 a year on upkeep
  – 49% would be willing to pay a premium for LEED certified construction
  – 53% of readers have used the Forum in the past year to find a contractor
  – 55% own a car
  – 55% are childless, 22% have just one child, 23% have two or more
  – 59% of readers with school-age children send them to public school
  – 74% go out to dinner at least 3 times a month
  – 35% order take-out at least 10 times a month
  – 50% have used the Restaurants section to find a restaurant
  – 72% have a Facebook account, 24% have a Twitter account

We’ll drop some more detailed graphics on you over the coming weeks.

Sorry for the hour-long outage we just experienced. Posts are now publishing again but the techies are still working on an issue surrounding user profiles so you may have difficulty logging in for a bit. If you were following us on Twitter, you would have received an alert about the technical difficulties.

The Village Voice Best of NYC 2009 awards are out and Brownstoner.com has gotten the nod in a category called “Best Place to Vent Your Renter’s Rage.” Judging from the explanatory text, the pricing widget (which The Voice calls “a fun little experiment in anger management”) played a big part in bringing home the gold. Check out the description of how a hypothetical widget session plays out on the link.

You may have noticed the username jscheff showing up under some posts this week. That would be our new writer, Jonathan Scheff. He’s currently undergoing blogging boot camp in hopes that he will be able to step into the driver’s seat by the time we’re ready to head to Hawaii for a week at the end of the month. So be nice! Prior to this, Jonathan has contributed to The Week, Scientific American and amNY among other publications.

We’ve just launched a new website this morning called bk.ly that is designed to serve two purposes: 1) As URL shorteners become a ubiquitous part of the Internet experience, it makes sense to have some kind of local identity to the shortened web addresses, especially in the case of Brooklyn where local pride runs thick; 2) Twitter also provides a powerful way to collect and rank local news. The way site works is pretty simple: If you tweet a link that’s been shortened using the bk.ly URL shortener, it’ll automatically show up in the site’s Tweet stream; likewise, if you append any Tweet with the hashtag #bknews, it will also show up in the stream. The latter will hopefully be used widely for mobile Tweets like “three-car accident at Fulton and South Oxford #bknews”. We’ve also got a Most Popular widget on the site to track which links have been Tweeted the most. (This will soon be available for any bloggers to embed on their own sites.) Within the next couple of weeks, you’ll be able to log into the site with your Twitter username and Tweet directly from bk.ly while tracking the click-through performance of your links. It’s very much an experiment so we look forward to specific suggestions to make it more useful and user-friendly.

If you’re a Property Shark user, you may have noticed Brownstoner posts integrated with the service’s property profiles; as of this week, you’re also able to view all the GMAP’d posts from the Brownstoner archives in a single map view on Property Shark and in the site’s extensive residential listings. Going forward, they’re going to start including posts from other blogs that deal with specific properties. We’re biased, of course, but we think this should add a useful and fun layer to an already invaluable resource.