stevenberlinjohnson.com: Blogs and the short block Blogs and the short block

Jason Kottke posts about the virtues of short blocks, which he's noticing with fresh eyes now that he's relocated to the West Village. (Welcome, Jason!) Jane Jacobs talks about this in Death and Life: why the tighter, short-block grid is preferable to the looser grid with long stretches between intersections. It's one of the gems from that book that I didn't address in Emergence, but I've talked about it in a couple of speeches, including one at O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference last May. Jason and I were emailing about the idea -- and how it potentially connected to the web, and the blogosphere -- and I realized that I'd never published anything about short blocks. (As far as I can remember.)

I think there is a useful connection to be made here. The power of short blocks is ultimately that they create a more even density in the city fabric: because short blocks offer more potential routes from x to y, they diversify the flow of pedestrian traffic through the city. In the long blocks model, pedestrians are funneled onto a few primary pathways, which quickly become over-crowded. With short blocks, they spread out through the entire street system. So you get some people on every street, unlike the long blocks model, which puts all the people on some streets, and no people on other streets. In the long blocks model, you get Times Square interspersed with desolate stretches; in the short blocks model you get the West Village: a bar or restaurant on every corner, a few interesting boutiques or bookstores in between, an interesting mix on the sidewalk, but never so much that you feel crowded out.

If you translate all this over to the Web, it seems to me that the blogosphere is the closest thing going to the short blocks neighborhood: the population density is not nearly as oppressive as what you find on the major sites (much less old media networks.) But it's not as atomized as the world of IM. Short blocks is 50 people on the sidewalk at any given time, instead of 5 or 500. The blogosphere is 50 people on the site at any given time, instead of 5 or 5 million. (Which reminds me of Dave Weinberger's line: "On the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people.") That's a very human scale, I think -- it opens you up to new perspectives, but doesn't overwhelm you at the same time.