Matt Waite posed a good question in the comments to yesterday’s post about making our investment in the neighborhood boundary data that underlies Backyard Post pay off. Basically, when it comes to such detailed information, do I worry about being too small? Too micro? My thoughts on that topic sprawl ever so slightly, so better to promote them to a full post.

I used to worry about being too small, and settling on a standard for what constitutes a neighborhood drove me crazy back in the fall of 2006. Then I had something of a revelation: I stopped thinking about data and geography and started thinking about community. Then I sort of, um, had to kind of, uh, start over. A little.

Geographic thinking was paralyzing. Too big? Too small? Will the data be relevant? Will my medians, means and modes be meaningful? I was chasing my tail, and it was all basically meaningless in relation to the true goal of Backyard Post. We weren’t just setting out to create a more upscale data ghetto, after all, but to truly reappraise what a local newspaper can be online, to be less a destination and more a network, as Rich Gordon once put it. Today Backyard Post is called a niche newspaper site, a data-driven super-local thing. Tomorrow, I truly believe, it simply will be the newspaper site. In that context, the neighborhood doesn’t exist merely to contain data.

But back to geographic thinking. Community thinking is so comparatively simple: Size doesn’t matter. If you ask someone where they live, and they say The Preserve at Snooty Oaks (Matt’s example, which probably exists somewhere), not the overall Snooty Oaks subdivision, then they live in The Preserve at Snooty Oaks. The goal is simply to drill down to our area’s most elemental communities, as defined by the people who actually live there. My oversimplified motto is, “If it has a sign, it’s a neighborhood.” (And then we take a picture of the sign.)

I live in a commercial construct sort of like Snooty Oaks, actually. Abacoa in Jupiter includes more than a dozen individual neighborhoods, but also is an identifiable entity overall. Still, I think of myself as a resident of Canterbury Place at Abacoa, not Abacoa, because my neighborhood is different from the others. If not in appearance or character, than at least in price. And even if not in price, than merely because, well, that’s just where I live. And we have our own sign.

Ibis Golf & Country Club is another example that’s actually in the current release of Backyard Post. Ibis has a fancy entrance with a gate and is patrolled by, no joke, gun-toting private security guards. But behind the gate are 33 individual communities. Eagle’s Isle at Ibis might have only 20 houses, but it’s clearly distinct. It’s an island surrounded by a golf course, for one thing. Too, the homes there sell for up to $3 million, a big difference from Larkspur Landing at Ibis, where the 78 townhouses sell in the $200s. On the other hand, this neighborhood, called RiverWalk doesn’t subdivide itself into smaller “villages,” so it’s just one big, honking neighborhood.

We go vertical, too, not just horizontal. Some condo towers might have a footprint not much bigger than a trailer park clubhouse, but with hundreds of units stacked 20-stories high they could be home to as many people as a 2,000-acre subdivision.

All of that said, there’s value in being able to zoom out. There are no doubt many interests common to residents of all 33 Ibis neighborhoods, for example. Maybe you just want to back up a bit to see more recent home sales, or more general discussion. They’re not really evident in the current version of Backyard Post, but we have a geographic category above neighborhoods called superdivisions that contains all the individual parts of places such as Ibis. And we can always build a more detailed geographic hierarchy on top of our neighborhood foundation. That’s the beauty of the DIY approach. It’s our data, and we can do anything we want with it.

(Props to Flickr user dogwelder for the microscope picture.)