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.

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