A recent Comment of the day contended that the Latino and African-American population of Uptown is waning rather than increasing as 2005 Census data suggest.

The source that mass-marketers rely on for targeting demographics and lifestyles around the country is Claritas' PRIZM NE, a source that I've found to be as accurate and up-toi-date (2007 data) as any national database can be. You can look up and research any ZIP code in the US at PRIZM NE's "You are where you live" page.

PRIZM NE assigns multiple lifestyle clusters to each ZIP. One of the six clusters for Uptown / Edgewater ZIP code 60640 is "Big City Blues," which is summarized as follows:

Lower-Mid, Middle Age Mix

With a population that's almost 50 percent Latino, Big City Blues has the highest concentration of Hispanic Americans in the nation. But it's also the multi-ethnic address for low-income Asian and African-American households occupying older inner-city apartments. Concentrated in a handful of major metros, these middle-age singles and single-parent families face enormous challenges: low incomes, uncertain jobs, and modest educations. Roughly 40 percent haven't finished high school.

As traditional advertising and marketing lose their grip, people are taking their cues as to what's good and bad from peer reviews on the Internet.

You can see ratings and reviews on almost anything at sites such as Amazon, Yelp, Trip Advisor, Best Buy, and more. Almost anything: you can't see what others are saying about what may be the largest purchase you'll ever make – a newly-built home.

We've just launched, in a beta version, the ability for you to rate and review new construction projects in Chicagoland at our NewHomeNotebook site. This is just one small piece of a series of capabilities we'll be adding to NewHomeNotebook over the course of the next year. And, to the best of our knowledge, NewHomeNotebook is the first Web site to offer this capability.

Yo staff will be posting info and updates on NewHomeNotebook to make it easy for you to track the progress of a project over time.

Add your ratings and reviews on NewHomeNotebook on projects that you've visited. You'll need to register with a valid e-mail address to write a review.

We're doing our best to ensure that every new construction project and condo conversion in Chicagoland is listed at NewHomeNotebook, but that's a huge challenge. If you're aware of a project that we've missed, fill out this form and we'll check out the project and add it.

And, we ask your patience as we debug this beta version and polish the rough edges.

We've had a long-standing goal of making it easy for you to find information about every new construction project in the City of Chicago.

New Home Notebook, a product of our sister company, is the way we've chosen to accomplish that goal. The first phase of New Home Notebook went live late this evening. Phase I is simply a list of all of the projects we're aware of, with links to Web sites built on our new platform for some of those projects.

Another goal is to enable home buyers to rate and review new construction projects, and post photos they've taken of those project and the surrounding area. When this functionality rolls out, YoChicago staff will rate and review projects along with home buyers, and the results will be available in a format that's easier to access than YoChicago's blog format. We'll launch those features, and a lot more, over the next few months. To understand where New Home Notebook is heading, think Amazon or Yelp for new construction.

We appreciate your patience with the inevitable launch glitches, and strongly encourage your feedback.

After "unique," elegant is one of the most indiscriminately-used words in the real estate language. I've often thought that others find the word as annoying as I do, but don't communicate that to real estate agents. It remains the elegant in the room.

I've taken to suggesting to real estate agents that the word is little used among people not in the business, and that many people react to it as I do. My real estate agent co-sponsors for NorthfieldBuzz, Coldwell Banker's Bonnie Larson and Linda Martin, disagreed and we engaged in an ongoing riff on the topic as we drove through parts of Northfield today.

To test my theory, I asked several people we met along the way about their reaction to the word "elegant." Their responses were, I have to say, humbling and elegantly phrased. I couldn't find anyone who agreed with me.

This video is part of our sister company's "Northfield project," an exploration of the use of freely-available Web sites to provide a richer overview of micro-sized real estate markets for home buyers and sellers. The project's basic building blocks are a social networking site, NorthfieldBuzz (currently under development), extensive use of YouTube videos (65 are available; 100s more to come) and Flickr photos (over 600 so far), a Google Sites page (stay tuned) and much more in the pipeline. If you're interested in north-suburban Northfield, check out our efforts thus far.

In past generations, if you were looking to buy a home, the process was pretty straightforward: You'd get the Sunday paper, pull out the real-estate section, and pour over the classified ads. Since the dawn of the digital age, though, the process has changed entirely. There's much more information available now, which can certainly make things easier, but it can complicate the search as well.

Blogs like this one are an obvious first stop for prospective home buyers, but there several other sources - on the Web and elsewhere - that people use to shop for condos in Chicago. For example, Comcast recently unveiled its new unveiled Real Estate On Demand, which provides broadcast-quality video tours of condos and new homes. Real Estate On Demand is free to the more than 1 million subscribers to digital cable in the Chicago area, and they can browse through a cache of videos and listings with their TV remotes.

There are also a number of new Web sites that have changed the way we shop for new homes. Move.com, the official listing website of the National Association of Home Builders, has emerged as a nationwide search engine for real-estate listings. Homescape.com, a joint venture of five of the country's biggest media companies, has pursued a similar niche, creating a search engine for more than two million homes nationwide. Homescape partnered with more than 125 different newspapers from across the country, aggregating real-estate classified ads from across the country on one website.

I think we all agree that new construction Web sites are rarely intuitive or informative. So which sites are most helpful (aside from YoChicago, of course), and what kind of information matters most (prices, pictures, floor plans, etc.)?

What are your favorite sources of local and national real-estate information? Are you a Cribchatter junkie? Is Chicago Condos Online in your RSS reader? Feel free to gush (or gripe) about your blog roll and bookmarks.

What isn't? Is there a more annoying category of Web site?

The sites appear to be designed by passive-aggressive creeps who hate anyone who has the money to buy a new construction home. They combine lengthy Flash downloads with weird navigation schemes and low-contrast tiny type that's difficult to read. Perhaps the designers are literate enough to realize how grotesquely pretentious and stupid much of the copy is and make it difficult to read as their one kindness to site visitors.

I could extend this rant, but I'd prefer to hear what the readers have to say on the subject. Fire away.

Version 4.3 of Google Earth has just been released. It's an indispensable tool for anyone who wants a quick look at an unfamiliar neighborhood.

The satellite views offer more detail than the previous version. The real stunner, however, is the new Street View, offering much higher resolution images and covering more screen real estate, in the full screen view, than the views in Google Maps. Navigation isn't as seamless as it might be, but overall the immersive views more than compensate for the minor awkwardness of the interface.

Check it out.

Unless you're a photographer or someone who commissions photography, you're probably not familiar with the techniques of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging – and you don't need to be.

If you love Chicago, you'll be enthralled by the images this technique can produce. Here's a Chicago HDR slide show at Flickr for your afternoon amusement.

Call me a nerd, but I can waste an entire evening clicking through Wikipedia articles. Napoleon, photosynthesis, that dastardly Don Denkinger; slap an entry on Wikipedia's front page, and I'll probably skim through it.

The wiki method of collecting and connecting information is quite popular these days, so it's no surprise that all sorts of fields and areas of interest are creating their own little wiki databases. (My fave? Wookiepedia.)

The real-estate world is no exception - the Real Estate Wiki encyclopedia has been up since January, and in its first six weeks has expanded to more than 10,000 entries, according to a media release.

The encyclopedia currently features more than 3,000 definitions of real-estate terms, articles on buying, selling and financing and 400 biographies of people in the real-estate profession. And yes, users get to add and edit content, so some of those entries could get verrry interesting. (Like Wikipedia, Real Estate Wiki allows readers to comment on specific entries in on a "discussion" page, a notion that should have some of you salivating like Pavlov's dog.)

Of course, the Wall Street Journal reported today that home buyers seem to be a lot more tech-savvy than their agents, so can we expect much participation from the real-estate community in this endeavor? And more importantly, who's going to have the first stab at penning a YoChicago entry?

In the fictional town of Lake Wobegon "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

Visit Dream Town Realty's revamped Web site and, on the shores of Lake Michigan you'll find a fictional town where all the neighborhoods are wonderful places to dine, shop, educate your children, cavort in the parks and bask in the glow of ever-rising property values.

Chicago Magazine's Dennis Rodkin was impressed by the site and its voluminous neighborhood information which was, according to Dream Town's Yuval Degani, "researched at travel-magazine quality."

The goal of a travel magazine is to sell travel to the destinations it features, and the goal of Dreamtown's site is to sell real estate in Chicago's neighborhoods. Since most of the buying public aren't complete fools the most effective sell is one that omits inconvenient truths altogether or, in Winston Churchill's resonant phrase, attends them with "a bodyguard of lies."

I've spent a fair amount of time in Englewood in the course of a dozen visits over the past year. See our video playlist at YouTube, spend some time in Englewood, talk to its residents, and then visit Dreamtown's Web site to "Imagine Englewood If" there were no drugs, no lead poisoning, no gangs, no random shootings, no soul-killing schools – and no aura of despair.