Blogs
October 29, 2009
Brownstoner 2009 Survey Results
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.
October 27, 2009
Back Up Now - Sorta
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.
October 22, 2009
Kudos, Sorta, from The Village Voice
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.
August 5, 2009
Please Welcome Our New Writer
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.
July 27, 2009
BK.LY Launches
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.
July 17, 2009
Property Shark Adding Blog Content
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.
May 12, 2009
Call For Community Board Bloggers
There's been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about the decline of newspapers and whether blogs will be able to pick up the slack as newspapers cut back in general and on their local coverage in particular. We'd like to try to take one step to address this issue by increasing our coverage of what's happening at the community board level. To that end, we're putting out a call for people who would like to cover their community boards. All we'd expect is that you'd make it to the general meeting every month plus the odd land use, transportation or parks & recs committee meetings when there's something particularly juicy on the agenda. No formal journalism skills are required. Reliability, attention to detail and some common sense should be all you need. You could be in grad school or a grandparent, we don't care; and you should own a digital camera. There will be a modest stipend for each report but don't expect to retire on it. If you're interested, please email brownstoner@brownstoner.com with "Blogger: CB #" in the header (substitute whatever community board number you want to cover for the "#" symbol). Let's see how this goes...Update: Thanks to everyone who's emailed already. Keep 'em coming! We're going to let the dust settle before getting back to everyone directly in the next couple of days.
May 7, 2009
Two Years Ago on Brownstoner
Clinton Hill House Tour Wrap
Watch Out for Falling Objects
Residential Sales in Brooklyn
Where to Look for a Fence?
Development Watch: 792 Sterling Place
Co-op of the Day: The $85,000 One Bedroom
House of the Day: 181 St. Marks Avenue
Brooklyn Blogfest Tonight
Tonight the Fourth Annual Brooklyn Blogfest takes place at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo. Organized by Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, the event will feature a panel discussion called "Why We Blog" as well as several small break-out sessions led by various local bloggers. Also in the line-up: a video about the borough's photobloggers, the blogger shout-out and Flea vendor Whimsy & Spice. Doors open at Powerhouse Books at 37 Main Street in Dumbo; the after-party will be held across the street at Galapagos.
May 4, 2009
Real Estate Blogs: Double-Edged Swords
The opening sentence of the cover story of this weekend's NY Times Real Estate section sets up the article with a false premise: "As unsold properties proliferate and encounters with the scalpel fail to move them, some New York City sellers are being undermined by an often nameless enemy." See, we'd argue that the sellers aren't being undermined at all (except in the case when actually false information is put forth). Rather, in our view, sites like Curbed, Brownstoner and StreetEasy are just expediting the process of bringing sellers' expectations in line with the market—and calling lazy brokers to task for providing insufficient information and sub-par photographs. Input from thousands of other market-savvy readers can also help to bring much needed transparency and frankness to the process, all of which—hopefully—makes the market more efficient. “People are asking questions they can’t ask their broker, and they’re really interested in the qualitative perspective, in getting opinions of people," said Dawn Doherty, the vice president for strategic development at StreetEasy.com. While there have been instances of brokers and owners identifying themselves and countering criticism successfully on Brownstoner in the past, some brokerages are clear gun-shy, and probably with some reason. “We basically do not allow our agents to post comments without prior approval, because we think it’s a can of worms,” said Diane Ramirez, the president of Halstead Property. “Unless something is egregiously incorrect, it’s almost better to let it die, because if you comment on it, it takes on a life of its own.” Some brokers realize that, more often that not, the benefits of publicity are worth the price of a few online pot-shots.
Snark Attack [NY Times]
April 10, 2009
Social Media Update
Just a reminder of the other ways you can connect with us:
— Follow Brownstoner on Twitter
— Become a Fan on Facebook
— Become a Friend on Facebook
April 9, 2009
Rebel Alliance Starts Free 'Other Park Slope Parents' List
Last week's news that the popular Park Slope Parents list and website was considering charging members a $25 annual fee elicited a wide range of response from its users and others (see the poll we ran here) as well as plenty of news coverage. And now there's another response: A band of dissenters has started a new free list targeting parents in the Park Slope area called The Other Park Slope Parents list. The group describes itself as "Fall off of parents who were a part of the Park Slope Parents list and believe that community lists should be FREE." For now, moderation is "light" and they're hoping that people "think twice before you post on a potentially flammable subject (ie vaccinations)." This should be interesting.
Majority of Park Slope Parents Won't Pay to Play [Brownstoner]
Park Slope Parents to Start Charging for Membership [Brownstoner]
April 3, 2009
Brownstoner on Twitter
480 readers are already following our feeds on Twitter. You can too.
Check us out here.
Majority of Park Slope Parents Won't Pay to Play
We asked, you responded: If the survey we ran yesterday is to be believed, slightly more than half of the subscribers to the Park Slope Parents group are unwilling to pay anything for the service; only 20 percent are happy to pay the proposed $25 fee (or more). Yikes. That does not bode well. We suspect they're going to have to back away from this idea.
Park Slope Parents to Start Charging for Membership [Brownstoner]
April 2, 2009
Park Slope Parents to Start Charging for Membership
The popular list serve Park Slope Parents (which is up to 13,000 members) announced yesterday that it plans to start charging $25 a year per household. Not surprisingly, a debate is raging on the list. We're curious to know what you think of that. Please take this super-quick survey we put together here to weigh in.
Brownstoner Monthly Traffic Tops 1.5 Million Pageviews
We just crossed an important milestone last month, clearing 1.5 million pageviews for the first time. Last year we bounced around in a trading range of 1 million to 1.2 million but started breaking out in January. Thanks to all the readers, contributors and advertisers who've helped make it happen.
March 31, 2009
Robert Guskind Memorial This Saturday
A memorial gathering to honor the memory of Robert Guskind, the beloved Brooklyn blogger who died earlier this month, will be held from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 4 at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 4th Avenue between Union and President Streets in Park Slope. Please RSVP, as space is limited. If you’d like to make donations in Bob’s memory, four charities have been designated.
March 30, 2009
Blogging for a Living
The Post's article today about blogging for a living isn't online as far as we can tell so we uploaded a pdf here. Update: Okay, turns out it is online after all. Here's the link.
March 27, 2009
Let's Talk About Commenting
We twittered about this a few days ago, but we'd like to open it up for discussion: What can we do to improve the overall the quality of comments on the blog, to encourage lurkers to get involved without alienating some of the more active and, um, spirited commenters? We hear quite often from regular readers who feel uncomfortable, even intimidated, with the prospect of commenting. This isn't surprising given the verbal beat-down one new commenter received from a gang of regulars a couple of weeks ago. Nor is the level of discussion going on in today's Open Thread really where we'd like it to be. Short of active comment moderation, which really isn't a practical option, what do you think we can/should do to elevate the quality of discussion and make newcomers feel more welcome? We'd be particularly interested to hear from some folks who usually hang back on the sidelines. It's in the best interests of the blog and everyone who reads it to have as many people contributing their knowledge and opinions as possible.
Thanks,
Mr. B
March 20, 2009
Brownstoner on Twitter
310 readers are already following our feeds on Twitter. You can too. Check us out here.
March 18, 2009
Closing Bell: Save the Date for Brooklyn Blogfest 2009
The Fourth Annual Brooklyn Blogfest will take place on May 7th at powerHouse Arena in Dumbo. Brooklyn Blogfest is an event for bloggers, blog readers, and the blog curious. It's your chance to meet your favorite bloggers, learn about blogging, and maybe even be inspired to blog. There will also be a video tribute to Brooklyn's photo bloggers. The after-party (of course, there is an after-party) is across the street at Galapagos Art Space complete with a cash bar.
March 6, 2009
Gowanus Lounge Is Back Online
Gowanus Lounge is back online. Following the death of its founder, Bob Guskind, a few of his close friends have been given access to the site and plan to post information about obituaries and a memorial service.
February 28, 2009
A Little Help
We're at home in bed with the flu thing that's going around so it's looking like we won't be able to make our usual rounds this weekend. As a result, we could really use some Development Watch and Streetlevel tips (or anything else that catches your eye) with photos! Please send 'em along to brownstoner@brownstoner.com.
Thanks a lot.
Mr. B
Latest Restaurant Additions
-
Chickadee Chick
added November 6, 2009 12:00 PM in Park Slope -
Vutera
added November 5, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Park Cafe
added November 4, 2009 12:00 PM in Park Slope -
Bahia
added November 3, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Aqualis Grill
added November 2, 2009 12:00 PM in Fort Greene -
Wombat
added October 30, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Organic Heights
added October 29, 2009 12:00 PM in Park Slope -
Giardini Pizza
added October 28, 2009 12:00 PM in Carroll Gardens -
Rye
added October 27, 2009 12:00 PM in Williamsburg -
Bati
added October 26, 2009 12:00 PM in Fort Greene