i^ For internet-related terms such as “the web” or “email,” I have adopted the conventions of Wired Style.

ii^ According such books as Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life (1999) and James Jasper, Restless Nation: Starting Over in America (2000), we are a culture that has worshiped mobility from its inception and the economic changes of the last half-century have allowed us to act on these originary impulses to an exaggerated degree. We now suffer from an epidiemic of mobility and an imaginative deficiency that makes it difficult to realize the costs of mobility. What is more, even when we do settle down, the kinds of places that the majority of Americans now inhabit—the suburbs—tend to further discourage a deep sense of belonging, asserted by jeremiads against sprawl such as James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape would argue.

iii^ This cultural shift has been in the works for some time and can be traced to numerous communication and technological developments, but the emergence of the internet has offered a perfect tool for growing information exponentially. Kevin Kelly describes the internet as a copy machine that “copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it.” This copying process is so efficient once something is put into the internet, “it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire.” Our economy now also rides on this “super-distribution system” which has forced some momentous shifts in the way we think about the value of information. Kelly states it simply: “When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.” For this reason, “money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits” (Kelly).

iv^ As Jones argues, “all interpersonal communication is based on attention: getting attention and ‘paying attention.’ Not only is attention organized around behavior, but behavior is organized around attention” (152). Likewise, Charles Derber claims that “without attention being exchanged and distributed, there is no social life. A unique social resources, attention is created anew in each encounter and allocated in ways deeply affecting human interactions” (2). Jones points out that most studies of attention have focused on it as set of individual “cognitive mechanisms” such as “ alertness, orientation, detection, facilitation, and inhibition.” However, in social settings, “attention is not just an individual cognitive process, but also a kind of commodity that interlocutors trade in interactions.” Jones argues that we need to view attention as being made up of two facets, the “cognitive attention system” in which individuals “mentally distribute their attention across various activities they are involved in” and the “social attention system” in which participants “display attention and … interpret displays of attention by others” (153).

v^ A blog carnival is “a blog-post that contains links to posts on other blogs.” See Bora Zivkovic’s “Blog Carnivals and the Future of Journalism” for more description.

vi^ When the full names of bloggers are unknown, I will simply reference their first names or screen names.

vii^ In a study of blogs content collected from March through May 2003, the period when the Ecotone period is forming, shows that personal blogs were statistically more common (70%) and were more likely to be authored by women. Herring et al. argue that “by privileging filter blogs and thereby implicitly evaluating the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or newsworthy than those of other blog authors, public discourses about weblogs marginalize the activities of women and teen bloggers, thereby indirectly reproducing societal sexism and ageism, and misrepresenting the fundamental nature of the weblog phenomenon” (Herring, “Women”).

viii^ Stilgoe’s book can be seen as one of a group of books that were designed as guidebooks for exploring ordinary places: Grady Clay’s Close Up: How to Read the American City and Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America’s Generic Landscape. Farbstein, and Kantrowitz’s People in Places: Experiencing, Using, and Changing the Built Environment, Tony Hiss’s The Experience of Place: A completely new way of looking at and dealing with our radically changing cities and countryside, Morrish and Brown’s, Planning to Stay: Learning to See the Physical Feature of your Neighborhood. Witold Rybczynski asserts that Stilgoe has written “a little Baedeker of ordinary America that informs, charms, and saddens, all at the same time.” In Close Up, Clay explicitly sees his book as a Baedaker’s guide, a term used to describe his later books, Real Places: “Heavily illustrated by maps and photos, Clay’s vivid Baedeker reveals anew what’s oft concealed right-before-our eyes—and what it could become via his dynamic ‘way of seeing.’” On the back cover of Planning to Stay, a blurb by Public Art Review shares the travel guide metaphor: “The principles and basic approach can be applied to any vicinity…Think of it as a Baedeker’s Guide to your neighborhood.”