Police Blotter
Via Universal Hub (and inaugurating a new blog category, “Boston”): the City Record and Boston News-Letter (motto: “Observe and Preserve”) has been posting items from the Boston police blotter, e.g.:
A well dressed man called at No. 721 Washington Street, walked up stairs, pocketed a silver watch, and while walking off encountered the lady of the house, of whom he very politely enquired if Mr. Atkins lived there; on receiving a negative answer, he took up his line of march and has not been heard of since!
Note that these items are from the early 1800’s.
This is also an appropriate time to note what seems to me to be an uptick in geocentric blogging (or perhaps someone can suggest a better adjective). The Internet facilitates global communication, but can also build local community. The Universal Hub is a selective (edited) aggregator of Boston-area blogs—I expect this kind of thing will be common in cities around the world if it isn’t already.
adamg Jan 28
Thanks for the link! Universal Hub also has a completely unfiltered aggregator at http://www.universalhub.com/feeds – although to be honest, what would probably be more useful if you really want everything is to download the OPML file into a more flexible aggregator.
http://www.phillyfuture.org/ is a very similar city-based site (using the same software, even). http://www.greensboro101.com is another example, so, yes, they’re out there!
Charles Swift Jan 28
I would suggest “lococentric”. Universal Hub provides a great service to a blog like mine, where Google drives the most traffic and the Universal Hub comes in second, especially when Adam pulls an item out of the unfiltered feed and puts it on his front page. Universal Hub almost acts as a subscription agent for the City Record–those who come via Universal Hub are very likely to come back on a regular basis, whereas the Google folks are just looking for their specific piece of information.
Size might have something to do with it: one can keep pretty good tabs on the unfiltered feed with its current size. If there 6000 blogs in it, that might be another story.
The City Record isn’t quite listing the police blotter (I wish I could, but I’m not sure the records exist), rather, it is a republishing of all events and fires listed in the 1838 and 1841 Boston Almanacs. There just happened to be a bizarre crime wave on the day Adam cites.