Common wisdom has always been that the city I live in, Portland, Oregon is a haven for writers.  We have Powell’s after all, and for those of you who are only familiar with it online, the brick-and-mortar store is, and I’m not kidding, a whole city block full of books.

Many people blame it on the rain, although in truth when you look at the yearly totals of rainfall, Portland is far down the list.  But it does rain a lot between October and March and rainy days are conducive to writing and reading. 

So it should come as no surprise that Portland is number two in the country when it comes to blogging, after Austin.   The statistics are as follows:

14% of Portland-area adults have either read or added to a blog in the last 30 days.  (Hmmmm….not sure where they got this statistic.  I don’t recall them asking me.)

This equals 285,000 adults, or one in seven.

One of the fathers of the blogosphere lives down I-5 (we do not call it The 5, as they do in LA) in Corvallis.    Paul Bausch is a web developer who wrote the code for Blogger. 

Who knew?  There is a whole network of Oregon Blogs, which I am going to have to go investigate.  Meanwhile, you can read The Oregonian story on Oregon Live, here.