The P-I said last month that it was going to start launching neighborhood blogs as part of its online offerings, in essence going into head-to-head competition against neighborhood bloggers that are already out there. Well the first of these has launched, In Queen Anne. It looks like it just started today, and only has four entries so far, but it’s very much in the spirit of other neighborhood blogs. And one of the best things is that they tried to give the site its own branding separate from the P-I; it has a different look and feel than its parent site, and there aren’t any links to other P-I stories cluttering it up, just a discrete brought to you by seattlepi.com up in the corner. But they didn’t give it its own URL, they made it a subdirectory: http://blog.seattlepi.com/inqueenanne. And they have ads – lots of big ads. But that makes sense too, because the P-I is doing this to raise the amount of ad inventory they have available and bring in more revenue. I don’t see any ads from Queen Anne businesses though, and I’d say they should send their sales people out knocking on doors to fix that. They do have a list of writers that actually live in Queen Anne, so it looks like they’re trying to do the right thing. We’ll have to keep an eye on it, and also wait to see what other neighborhood blogs they launch.

Photo from Flickr user Mortgage Porter.

Not everyone was riding the train yesterday. Saturday was also the day of the big West Seattle Grand Parade, and West Seattle Blog brings fantastic coverage, photos and videos of the event.

• Report #1: Side notes
• Rotary Kiddies’ Parade 2009
• Report #2: The protectors
• Report #3: The winners!
• Wrapup #4: The crowd-pleasers
• Wrapup #5: The politicians

Unfortunately the bulk of their coverage during the parade was done on Twitter, and while that’s great for folks who are watching live, Twitter’s handling of archives leaves a lot to be desired. So it’s tough to go back and look at their coverage, much less link to it.

There are also a bunch of photos at the West Seattle Blog Flickr group.

Yesterday was the big day. Seattle’s light rail system finally opened to the public. Now I couldn’t be there to ride it and report on it, but many other people were, so there are tons of reports all over the web from the big opening day.

Seattle Transit Blog probably had the most persistent coverage. Several of their writers spent all day on the train, riding back and forth between downtown and Tukwila, checking out the people, the trains, and the stations. Their conclusion is that hopefully the train will bring Seattle’s neighborhoods together more than the bus or car ever could.

The Seattle P-I’s transportation blog also covered the opening day. They were at the big ceremony at the Mount Baker station, where the mayors of Seattle and Tukwila rode trains from the two ends of the line to meet in the middle. Ribbons were cut, and speeches were given, then everyone got to ride the train. They also reported that the trains were standing-room-only, as can be seen above, and that waits at the stations reached up to 30 minutes to get on board. The fact that the trains are free all day Saturday and Sunday probably helped that. All together 45,000 people rode the train yesterday.

The NW Progressive Blog has plenty of photos. There are also a ton of pictures on Flickr, and videos on YouTube.

I can’t wait to get up there and ride the train myself!

Update: a few more links.

Seattle By Rail is a new blog focused on the light rail, opening day, and all the stations along the route.

Seattle Transit Blog had their opening day post-mortem.

A Flickr set of photos from opening day, by Lee LeFever (who runs Seattle By Rail).

Gardiner Davis in Crosscut brings a gripping story of a trip to the Methow River, about how it’s important not to underestimate Mother Nature, and how quickly a bad situation can turn worse.

I realized that I was involved with forces I had never experienced before. My waterlogged clothes were like a sail in the water. There was no way either I or the dog — aged, beloved, sodden, and dragged down with soaked hair — were going to have any control over the forces acting on us. It wasn’t personal. It was just nature doing its thing. We could die.

Today MyBallard put up a simple post about a couple of billboards that were vandalized in town. Starbucks and McDonald’s billboards were painted over, changing a few words to leave funny commentaries about the quality of their food. “It’s not just coffee, it’s Starbucks” became “It’s not good coffee, it’s Starbucks”. And so on. Good for a chuckle, I twittered it, and let’s all move on.

Until the commenters got involved, at least. Then it turned into a holy war about good graffiti, bad graffiti, capitalism, and “multinational earth raping corporations”. 88 comments so far, and doubtless more will be added over the night. Quite a launching point for some people’s sore nerves, it seems.