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.

YoChicago focuses on new construction and neighborhoods in the city, but our sister company (Data Based Ads) ranges far and wide – managing ads for major real estate brokers from coast to coast, and providing Internet applications to newspapers from The Wall Street Journal to the Los Angeles Times and many others.

One of Data Based Ads' beta projects is WinnetkaNow, a social networking site for Winnetkans and would-be Winnetkans. The site, which is currently under development, will make Winnetka the most visible and most viewed of Chicago's North Shore communities.

You can, if you will, think of Winnetka as a lower-density, more affordable version of Lincoln Park with better schools and a comparable commute time to the Loop. Join WinnetkaNow for a video tour of several recent Winnetka developments.

932 Westmoor Rd, Winnetka

Library Plaza Townhomes, Winnetka

Stay tuned to WinnetkaNow's YouTube channel to see a lot more of Winnetka.

We were quite taken with EveryBlock, a new Web tool rolled out last month that aggregates news on a block-by-block basis, so we jumped at the chance to speak with Adrian Holovaty, creator of ChicagoCrime and EveryBlock.

In retrospect, our conversation ended up being a bit of a eulogy, because Adrian announced on his blog that ChicagoCrime will go dark this month, having been supplanted by the more robust EveryBlock.

Information junkies have been buzzing for the past few hours about EveryBlock, a new aggregator that creates news feeds for individual street blocks, neighborhoods and ZIP codes in Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

I subscribed to EveryBlock’s feed for the 1600 block of North Claremont Ave yesterday afternoon – so far it’s picked up a lot of blotter from the (newly sold) Lake View Booster, some Map Room reviews from Yelp and a couple of missed connections from Craigslist, but the site should be able to scrape info from civic databases, entries from local blogs and pictures from photo-sharing sites. (Has anyone found a Yo post on there yet?)

EveryBlock was designed by ChicagoCrime.org and Django creator Adrian Holovaty, who is probably most famous for living one floor above me during my freshman year at Mizzou. (FARC forever, Adrian!) Holovaty and his development team founded EveryBlock with a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation, according to the site.

Forbes Magazine has compiled a list of neighborhoods in the country's fifteen largest metro areas that have experienced the greatest price appreciation sine 1990.

Chicago is represented on the list by Wicker Park, where Forbes finds price growth of 1,870%.

Craig Gernhardt is a one man neighborhood crime watch, an all-purpose hyper-activist, and proprietor of the must-read The Broken Heart of Rogers Park. Tonight he's reporting on a new service in Rogers Park – door-to-door prostitution. Hey, it's cold outside.

Last July we mentioned a proposed condo conversion at 1330 N. Artesian.

The project is currently seeking investors to pony up $100K to $750K – through a post on a Facebook group. Creative financing (securities law issues aside) or a sign of desperation?

Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle is betting that investors and executives will have an appetite for short snippets from the real estate world.

The global brokerage firm recently launched a podcasting portal where its directors and brokers can sound off on compelling real estate topics, including hotel investment, sustainable design and the changing roles of real estate execs. About 15 two-minute recordings are available for download.

JLL is not alone in trying to connect with clients through the Web; Leopardo Construction, a Chicago-area building firm,  boasts 11 videos on its YouTube channel. Let us know: would you listen to a real estate podcast? What topics would make for a good broadcast?

New York-based Curbed.com, which bills itself as “a gossip site” is closing in on its long-rumored Chicago launch. It’s long been one of my favorite real estate sites.

For a preview of the Chicago version, take a look at the sample posts from writers auditioning for hire. Thanks for the link love, Lock.

Update: The page we linked has been redirected to a login screen. An unknown tipster contends it was not a sanctioned Curbed site. We're locked (Locked?) out of the posts we originally saw.