The people in Petworth are weird

diggin' petworth
Originally uploaded by IntangibleArts

(Flickr photo of random portrait from the groundbreaking ceremony of Park Place, a condo/retail development adjacent to the Petworth Metro station on Georgia Avenue, by IntangibleArts.)

Judging by the (mostly) reasonable, and deliberative community discussion by commenters about a neighborhood hostel ("Holy Cow: What the Hell is a “LOFTSTEL”?") and (yes) a strip club ("Friday Question of the Day") on the Prince of Petworth blog, which also has great photos of neighborhood houses and architectural features. For a neighborhood focused blog (or a listserv), it's rare to have quite the same quality level in the discourse.

Recently, the columbia_heights yahoogroup has been destroyed because of a handful of people with very particular agendas commenting on everything. Finally, people have stopped participating as a result. And that listserv was the first neighborhood listserv I ever joined, with over 1,200 list members. And that isn't the only forum so affected. My sense is that the signal to noise value of other listservs (at least the ones I am on) have dropped quite a bit over time, especially as blogs have skimmed many of the kinds of people who would have likely participated in neighborhood e-lists, were that the only option.