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Creative community: Great cities, it seems, are filled with idea people, the creative class who, if they are not lucky to be architects are perhaps their social and creative equals. San Francisco is cited as being "one of the most well-known havens of the creative economy."

(Great cities, in other words, need to have a high tolerance for over-educated trustafarians and a capacity for vigorous self-regard.)

The value of a service like ArtsJournal is that it looks a great number of things and with curators, it narrows it down to manageable numbers. But when you start adding more and more, then the curation changes. It may be easy for people to look at 20 stories every day, because they have time for that, but if you give them 30 stories, that takes more commitment. So the challenge is how do we make it easy to offer a lot of information and keep it highly curated enough to so that it is valuable for people who appreciate our judgment in choosing one thing over another.

The idea with the blog is to expand it to hundreds of bloggers, ultimately. But we have to install more curation. With 50 blogs there’s more to offer people. With 200 we have to curate it, to get the best of the best. Every time you add something you have to add another grade of curation.

The kind of mystery here is that as arts journalism disappears out of the traditional media, what replaces it, and how do you build a business model that supports people to do blogs? How do critics on the Web make enough money to sustain themselves? If you had a big network of arts blogs and sell advertising across it, advertisers are able to leverage the content that the bloggers provide across a lot of platforms, and then there’s a business model that emerges that can support someone to earn money from writing an arts blog.

Also, newspapers have never been able to cover community arts in an interesting way. Things like dance or jazz get really minimal coverage. However, now with the ease and the different ways that you can deliver information, we may discover a new model and improve the way that we cover culture. Right now we are in between the two models. The old one no longer works and the new one hasn’t been established.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I just spent a week in North Carolina with dance critics from around the nation. Like music, dance is hard to write about. You are trying to describe things that are not easy to describe. What would happen if we tried to describe an event in a new way? I broke them into three teams, and signed them up with blogger accounts, and gave them a Flip video camera, which has a convenient USB port with which to upload movies to You Tube. I asked them to use the video to compare dance styles, or show what you mean, or talk to critics, the audience, or the choreographer. So they had a day and a half to expand the palette on which they are working, to find something that is not so linear in form with which to describe this artistic experience.

People in Seattle say that we are one of the best regional orchestras in the country. That may be true, but when you look at the dynamic cities in the U.S. — the places where things really happen — you don’t think of that for Seattle or Portland when you think of the orchestra world. Why is that? What is the missing ingredient that prevents that from happening?

In Seattle, we have this great concert hall. That’s not to say that the Seattle Symphony is a bad orchestra. I just wonder if the ambition for them is not sufficient. Cleveland or Pittsburgh (among the top orchestras in the country) are not in communities that you would think can support such orchestras. Cleveland has lost half of its population in the last 20 years. But the Cleveland Orchestra continues to be a major, major orchestra.

The ambition to really excel at the first level has not been in Seattle or Portland. Maybe people here are so far away from major arts cities that they have nothing truly first-rate to compare our arts organizations with. But it is just strange, given the money, education, and arts involvement of this region, that the orchestras in Seattle and Portland have been left behind.

Because fashion trends come and go so quickly, women want to have over-the-top luxury accessories for special occasions without suffering buyer’s remorse or over-cluttered closets, [chief marketing officer Jodi] Watson says. Once customers have finished with their fashion statements, they can exchange them for the next things on their lists for a monthly fee, à la Netflix.

Women also use the company as a way to try the items out before sinking a few grand on the newest Gucci. The “steal” option in the company’s title allows customers to purchase any accessories, sometimes at discounted rates, depending on the make and condition of the item.

So it's a business that doesn't promote consumption, but in a way restrains it: instead of buying wardrobes with quick expire dates, you rent and return them. Sort of high-end fashion recycling.

So who rents this stuff? "Transumers." No, these aren't spendy trans-sexuals or transvestites, they're "people who want to experience luxury without the hassle of ownership."

Skolnik argues for a major revamp of historic preservation in Seattle. He is asking the city to appoint a citizen's task force to study the landmark processes and wants a moratorium on all landmark nominations and designations until they report. He believes the process needs to be more open, voluntary, incentive-driven, and re-organized to better represent the interests of property owners and developers. If not, he fears a backlash that could undo decades of preservation work.

Perhaps most infuriating to preservationists, he has said the current process results in property takings, implying Seattle's rules aren't simply misapplied, but illegal. His critique goes to the foundations of a system that has been at work in Seattle for decades. As it is, he says the process is "victimizing property owners." The debate is whether landmarking should be voluntary, or regulatory, like zoning.

Nobody's reading newspapers anymore.

And yet they are. And in record numbers. Look at this report in Editor & Publisher. The online audience is soaring, and here's the growth rate and numbers of unique readers for newspaper Web sites in January 2008:

Not only are these huge audiences, but the growth rates continue to be spectacular. By far, more people are reading newspapers than ever before. As just one example, scroll down the list to No. 16, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has a Web audience of 2.2 million people per month. The P-I's print circulation, when it was considered healthy in the previous century, was in the low 200,000s.

Conventional wisdom says that newspapers are caught in a business model which doesn't support the changes to digital media, and despite huge efforts, the newspaper industry is in decline. Maybe there's no longer a place for traditional newspapers.

The conventional wisdom is crap.

It's hard to take claims that newspapers are taking the Digital Age seriously when they have so under-invested to compete in it. Consider:

• Most digital operations are seriously under-staffed and under-resourced. They don't employ even the basic traffic-building strategies that independents are using with great success.
• Newspapers have declined to innovate as eBay, Craigslist, Monster.com, Google, and myriad ad networks have sprouted, thrived, and stolen customers.
• Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and others are experimenting with community selection of news, while newspapers pay little more than lip service to reader involvement.
• Hundreds of small Web operations have sprung up to compete with traditional newspapers, while news organizations remain mired in old conventions.
• Social networking has changed the way young people interact, yet newspapers have failed to meaningfully take the plunge.

Pretty much every online initiative in the traditional news industry has been me-too-ism rather than bold invention. The back-end digital news production structure at most newspapers is a mess. Many papers still bizarrely consider their online and paper versions separate operations.

Let me focus on one area in some detail: ads. Say I want to advertise on the Web site of my local paper. How about those 2.2 million P-I readers? I go to the Web site. Look for how to do it. Not easy. I have to call someone, negotiate a deal. Can I advertise on the newspaper's blog that I know all my customers are reading? No. No one's advertising there. So how much will it cost? Not worth it to me.

Now go to any large blog. Next to every ad there's a link that says "advertise here." Click the link, you get rates, you can specify where it runs, and for how long. You can upload your ad online. If there's space, your ad can be up an hour from now. And the price drops if the space is under-utilized. Easy peasy.

At a time when Internet advertising can get ads to readers with incredible accuracy, why aren't newspapers on board? Last week, several newspaper companies announced a new ad network. This is only eight years late in happening, and it's not at all clear how this new network is going to make things better.

A local example: Here in Seattle, art galleries don't advertise in the local papers. Why? It's way too expensive, and it's probably not hitting the art-buying audience. Yet the popular online visual art blog of the P-I's art critic, Regina Hackett, is a place where the city's visual arts community increasingly logs in every day. Make the ads cheap enough, and galleries would be clamoring to buy space. The paper's Microsoft blog and venture capital blog have substantial, highly-sought-after audiences, yet the paper doesn't look to be even interested in attracting new advertisers for it. You don't think startups looking for funding wouldn't flock to the place where the VC's check in every day?

There are plenty of small businesses that would be micro-advertisers if the rates were right. And who has a bigger local audience online than the local newspaper? Traditional advertisers are falling away? Then start exploiting non-traditional advertisers. Hard to take newspaper execs seriously when they say they're trying everything they can to keep up their revenue. Meanwhile, they're not doing even what any savvy blogger can.

Builders respond to market demand. What is it people want?

In 1970, the average new single-family home was 1,500 square feet; in 2005, the figure swelled to 2,434 square feet — an increase of over 900 square feet.

In 1970, 36 percent of new homes were under 1,200 square feet; by 2005, only 4 percent were. In 1970, only 10 percent of homes were over 2,400 sq. feet; in 2005, 42 percent were.

American homes are bigger, taller, and with more amenities than the houses of old. The result: a large increase in the number of new two-story-plus homes (17 percent in 1970 vs. 55 percent in 2005), the number of bedrooms (four bedroom homes grew from 24 percent in 1970 to 39 percent in 2005), the number with 2-1/2 baths on the market has doubled, and the number of homes with two-car garages has increased from 39 percent to 64 percent — with an additional 20 percent of new homes sporting three-car garages. Size has mattered, too, in new multi-family housing, where the number of units over 1,200 square feet has doubled since 1990, from 20 percent to 43 percent.

America could be scaling expectations to bring about a lower-cost reality. We have not. But don't blame it all on the sprawling suburbs. You can see this upsizing in Seattle neighborhoods where bungalows are being remodeled and renovated by new buyers. Often, you'll see buyers take a small, 1,000-square-foot home, expand it, add granite countertops and a professional chef kitchen, add a deck, a bunch of bathrooms and walk-in closets, and flip it for high-end resale. A perfectly habitable small home that cost cost $500,000 has now been upgraded with completely optional lifestyle amenities, and the price more than doubled.

Silicon Valley resulted from a combination of powerful local institutions, savvy real estate development choices, immense capital investment by the Cold War military-industrial complex, and the simple good fortune of being on the right side of national economic and demographic trends. The repeated failures of other places to replicate that success – much less seize Silicon Valley's high-tech mantle – attest to the trickiness of getting this formula right.

The lessons of the tech industry's Cold War-era infancy still hold true today.

We get a shower of superlatives: $900 million, according to the New York financiers, 550 feet tall, 200 hotel rooms, and 400-500 condos.

But not to worry: These massive buildings will be "designed for neighborhood," meaning shops along the streetfront. The developers, with the engaging name of Hummingbird Advisors, are going to take a pretty dead block and "make it into a vital, vibrant pedestrian area." Of course, much of the lower level will be a blank wall concealing hotel ballrooms, but that's OK because the Monorail already blocks those views. (The architects' drawing artfully turns the Monorail into gossamer.)