Stereogum, the gossipy music blog, will have more pop culture punditry for its readers to chew on: Videogum, a new entertainment blog focusing on television, movies, web shorts, and video games will launch this spring.  read more »

The creators of real estate blogs like Curbed, Brownstoner, and Apartment Therapy hosted their second annual Design Blogfest holiday party at the Henrybuilt furniture store at 79 Wooster Street on Thursday night.

“Last year we promoted the hell out of the party on our blog,” said Lockhart Steele, the creator of Curbed. “We had 400 people in a tiny room like this.”

A couple of dozen family, friends, “hangers-on and groupies” showed up Thursday, Mr. Steele joked.

Five years ago none of the five bloggers attending the party knew each other, but since the medium began to explode, an informal, uncoordinated “blogger ecosystem” has emerged, explained Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, the co-founder of Apartment Therapy. “When we all met [around 2003] starting a blog was like living in a small town; they linked to you, you linked to them, then eventually we said, ‘Hey, let’s get a drink,'" he said.  read more »

Blog Curbed has the results of its poll last week on the five bids to develop the West Side rail yards. Brookfield Properties' bid (partly rendered above) won with over 40 percent of the nearly 4,000 votes.

The Observer's Matthew Schuerman reported last week that Brookfield's bid had emerged as a crowd favorite, including among those who visited the midtown exhibit showing all five.

...[J]udging from the early reaction among visitors to the exhibit space, Brookfield has also gained a lot of fans, both via online message boards and among visitors to the exhibit, for a plan that they say looks the most like the rest of New York.

Brookfield's early popularity with the masses is no guarantee it will get to build on the 26-acre site. The site's owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has the final say within the next few months, along with input from the Bloomberg administration.

The Observer will have an interview with Brookfield's chief executive Ric Clark in Wednesday's paper.

So, in an intriguing development for those of us obsessed with bloggy things,  here's what Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo web site is going to look like after the relaunch that the Observer's Felix Gillette wrote about a while back.

It's kind of an interesting look, with the new front page featuring a double-wide column for the main blog, then two news columns to the right featuring original videos, headlines from the wires and, significantly, the other blogs that are now part of the whole package. (The current site, which is going to disappear tomorrow, teases the non-Marshall blogs in the text of the main column.)

Also gone from the new site is that headshot of Marshall looking sternly over his glasses at you. Which sort of helps convey, whether by design or not, that the new site is the product of a network of journalists -- including esteemed Observer alumnus Greg Sargent -- rather than one hyperactive man and his computer.