There are some great traditions in the media world that are worth bringing over into neighborhood news. One is the “year in review” list that fills up time at the end of the year.  After all, it’s the holidays, and we’re all feeling too lazy to spend time looking for real news. 

Our first list is about participation on the site. We’ve specifically designed our software to make the site an online community, not just a blog where one or a few people broadcast to the masses.  We want everyone to speak up, whether in comments, by submitting their own stories, or uploading their own photos and videos. In the last year we’ve had over 4,000 comments from 1,082 different users. That’s almost 5% of the neighborhood’s population.

Obviously some folks are a bit chattier than others, and we’re thankful to have a core group of contributors that we can always depend on to keep things lively in the comment threads.  Here’s the top-ten registered commenters on the site:

 

One of the pleasant surprises of this effort has been how good the comments have been. They’re usually very thoughtful, helpful, and not at all typical of most comments on the internet.  Please keep talking in 2009!