Pittsburgh Hipper Than San Francisco?

If Pittsburgh is going to obsess about meaningless statistics, then we should obsess about the good ones: Pittsburgh is America's Third Bloggiest City, after Boston and Philadelphia, but ahead of such tech meccas as Seattle and San Francisco. The sponsors explain:

"Well, the figures represent the total number of place-based blog posts in March and April per 100,000 residents in the cities’ metro areas. So to arrive at this list we just took the total number of place-based blog posts in a city’s metro area, and divided by the number of people living in that area.

As far as why Boston and not NYC or SF, we see two possible factors influencing the list:

1. The demographics of a city’s metro area strongly shape its blogginess quotient. Cities like New York may have areas, like Brooklyn, that are very blog-dense, but if they also have big areas where blogs are sparse (like the Bronx), that will lower their overall post-to-resident ratio, making them less-bloggy cities. Chicago, Los Angeles and New York all scored lower on the list for this reason - they had lots and lots of local blog posts, but the sheer number of people living in those areas blew that number away. If your metro area has 19 million people in it, you’ve got to do a lot of blogging to get on the bloggiest cities list.

2. Blogginess in a city is reflective of growth, civic activism, and a writerly population. Boston, as the bloggiest city, has a hot economy, is notorious for local political activism, and has a university every other block, which all combine to push it’s post-to-resident ratio up-up-up.

When you factor these two things together, you get a list of mid-to-large-sized cities with neighborhoods in flux, active local political scenes, and residents with the inclination to write about these things. The result is the bloggiest cities in America list. Here’s the full top ten:

1. Boston
2. Philadelphia
3. Pittsburgh
4. Washington, D.C.
5. Portland, OR
6. New York
7. San Francisco
8. Seattle
9. Chicago
10. Los Angeles"

Works for me! Read the whole thing here.