This is great. NYCBloggers.com maps New York-based weblogs and bloggers onto their real-world, physical space locales. You can even view weblogs by subway station. I love these collisions between the "distancelessness of the Web" as David Weinberger has it, and the very real local communities-of-interest which exist within cities.
I'm reading Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined (like every other bugger) which is also great, so far. He notes, early on:
"We're getting to know many more people in many more associations than the physics of the real world permits, and these molecules, no longer bound to the solid earth, have gained both the randomness and the freedom of the airborne."
Which is absolutely true. I possibly even 'know' a few of those NYC bloggers. And yet, as has been evidenced by a few hundred years of communications technologies inter-relating with cities, these small pieces also tend to reinforce local communities in cities too. Sites like NYCBloggers seem to effortlessly coexist in both virtual and physical space(s) - someone decides to knock up a site listing NYC bloggers, in the meantime casually illustrating the infinitely flexible tensile strength between these small pieces - beautiful.
[via Matt Jones]
