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THE MEANEST BLOGGERS

It started a few weeks ago. A friend of mine was in the midst of looking for a new apartment and was therefore shamelessly trolling all the New York real-estate blogs at every free moment, investigating brokers' fees, plummeting rent prices, going rates and good neighbourhoods. He emerged with an emphatic complaint: "New Yorkers who comment on blogs are really mean." He attributed this to the guarded intensity and competitive knowledgeability we seem to have about our home-town.

I hadn't really thought about it before. Hadn't New York successfully shaken the rude-loud-fast stereotype? Aren't we a kinder city after 9/11--all of us in the trenches, gruff yet humane? Plenty of New York-based blogs bathe in an excess of snarky comments, but there are also simply plenty of New York-based blogs. Perhaps it's just the nature of the unwieldy beast.

Yet I recall one recent late-night blog-binge/shame spiral--like when you realise you're on the 50th picture of your friend's brother's girlfriend's sister's birthday Facebook album--when I found myself on an old page of a blog called Roadfood, reading about how to order bagels in New York. Both New Yorkers and non were weighing in, and one group was embarrassingly more intense, even cruel at times. The New Yorkers certainly kicked it up a notch.

Can a city really have a blogging culture? Are some urban centres better for blogging, the way others have the cleanest air, most parks or safest streets? The internet is often discussed as a "final frontier" of sorts--a place where you can sit in your underwear skyping while reading minute-by-minute Thai news and eating a bowl of Bolognese.

But perhaps the superhighway has borders. In a story about neighbourhood blogging in the New York Times, Gabriel Cohen observes that New York bloggers are especially "muscular" and "energetic", and commenters engage in "boisterous discourse". It hardly helps that blogs often enable anonymity. "A small, local discussion flares up into a larger argument about class and race," Cohen writes.

Commenting does seem to be a labour of love of sorts--one that often toes the fine line between passion and anger (something I've certainly noticed here and on Economist.com). If New Yorkers seem to have a certain online sensibility, what about all those other fair metropoli; are San Diegans more laid back, Londoners more polite? Who knows what other cultural truisms could be found? The way Google helps us figure out what love is, perhaps city blogs say something about urban character. ~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture credit: H. Michael Karshis (via Flickr)