Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Columbus?

Business Week has released a "Blog Belt" snapshot:
As Net connections spread, Web 2.0 services are expanding. On a recent day, these were the top 30 cities for blog postings and comments, divided into three tiers by levels of activity.

The lists are the usual large metro areas and wired and wireless meccas. And Columbus, Ohio, which comes in at number 30.
[HT: Chris]

7 comments:

Jefferson Provost said...

Well, Columbus is home to THE Ohio State University, the perenially second-largest university campus in the US.

Mike Madison said...

It's not the size of your equipment, it's how you use it. The student population in Columbus represents an unusually large chunk of the total population.

Anonymous said...

Why only ask about Columbus?
You didn't ask about Austin, Portland, Denver or St. Louis.

Columbus certainly is in the same league with these above mentioned cities.

Mike Madison said...

Austin and Portland are tech/geek/hipster meccas. Columbus is not.

The population of the Columbus (CSA) metro area is just under 2mm, which makes it a bit smaller than Pittsburgh.

The population of the St. Louis metro area is just under 3mm. It's a much bigger city. And it has an baseball team, and an NFL football team. (Some people say that Columbus, too, has a professional football team.)

The population of the Denver (CSA) metro area is also a hair under 3mm, and it includes a geek/tech/hipster mecca - Boulder.

IOW, Denver and St. Louis (and Pittsburgh) CSAs are ranked much higher in population than Columbus.

So the curiosity is that Columbus made the list (good for Columbus) and Pittsburgh did not (bad for Pittsburgh).

Anonymous said...

OSU has a much bigger undergraduate populations than Pitt.

Mike Madison said...

The BW graphic is mostly silent on the source of its data, but it does credit Feedburner, which suggests that the data is based on blogs and not on Facebook or MySpace or LiveJournal. OSU's huge student population would explain Columbus's rank, at least partly, if OSU students are big bloggers/commenters. Anecdotally, however, college students are much bigger consumers of Facebook and its cousins.

Also, what is the total population of college students in and around Columbus? What is the total population of college students in and around Pittsburgh? Does the OSU advantage still favor Columbus, even when Pitt is added to CMU, Duquesne, RMU, etc. etc. etc.?

Anonymous said...

As one of the Columbus bloggers in question, I gotta say that I was a little surprised at first. Truth be told, there's some great writing coming out of Ohio today (as I'm sure there is in Pittsburgh as well). For myself, It's just nice to see the CMH on the blog map.


Great header by the way--I dig it.