Many Neighborhoods Find a Voice Online

"One thing about people in Mount Pleasant is that they hate to go to meetings," said Collins, a former advisory neighborhood commissioner. "They will not go to a meeting unless there's something catastrophic, like murders and robberies. This fills a void in the sense that people can express how they feel, give their opinions and not have to be at a meeting."

Bob Kohlmeyer, 23, a government affairs coordinator for a trade association, acknowledges that he had a less civic purpose when he started a Glover Park listserv a few months ago. He hoped to meet women.

For months, he said, he had been riding the bus to work and noticing attractive women on board. At work, he posted messages about the women in the "Missed Connections" section of Craigslist and discovered that there were others who had come to the same conclusion, including women who had noticed attractive men.

So Kohlmeyer started the listserv in May and tried to arrange a "Bus Crush Happy Hour." Fifteen people showed up, many of them not from the bus.

Kohlmeyer said he has yet to get a date from the listserv, which has about 150 members. But something else has happened: The site has become a forum for discussion of community issues. On a recent night, a few members -- alerted to the issue by the site -- showed up at an Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting to support a new tavern seeking a liquor license.

"It has become like a big bulletin board, more than a waiting room," he said. "It's a way to share information."

When she started her blog in 2003, said Maxwell, an archive specialist at the National Archives, she was mostly concerned with writing about herself and her life in the eastern edge of Shaw near Truxton Circle. Then after she was able to accept postings, readers began writing in and sharing their observations about topics, including gentrification, crime and the best places to buy liquor.

"The blog is me complaining and me being me," Maxwell said.

Apparently she has fans. Her site, she said, receives some 450 visits daily. Recently, she announced that she would reduce from five to three the number of days when she posts ruminations, in part to lighten her workload.

"Fear not, I'm not going anywhere," she wrote. "Neither are the crack heads, the dealers, the bad section 8'ers, and horrid suburbanites who come in to trash the hood. As long as there are those folks, as well as the slow changes of a gentrifying neighborhood, I'll write about them."