Over at TellHimFred.com, Barry Freed gives an account of why he's leaving Revere. He believes he lives next to the worst human beings on the planet, and gives a strong case for their nomination as the World's Worst Neighbors.

Reporters beware, don't plunk.

The State House News Service reports that Michael Travaglini, executive director of the Massachusetts pension fund, told a local reporter, "You have no right to record a meeting".

Travaglini later defended his stance by stating the reporter disrupted the public meeting of the Pension Reserves Investment Management Board by arriving late and "plunking a recording device in the middle of the table".

Red line service was stopped around 1:30 AM today due to a girl jumping on the tracks, tweets Kevin Gilnack. The unknown female then proceeded to run up the tracks from Park Street and was caught at the Charles/MGH station.

Service was stopped due to officials turning off the third rail. Bus connections were apparently delayed too.

Recovering journalist Mike Ball has had enough of old-line media types and people like "The Wire" producer David Simon "defaming blogs and other online media."

... Saying that blogs don't do news anywhere near as well as newspapers is pitifully simplistic and quite naive. It's like damning a toddler who's learning to walk for not being able to perform ballet or tap dancing.

Newspapers have been failing and firing local reporters in clumps for decades. Local reportage has telescoped down pitifully. The spike is no longer the evil prop on the city editor's desk. There isn't enough local news for decent triage. There aren't enough reporters on the street and phones to provide the news. ...

At the corner of Mass Ave and State Street. One of those minivan school buses was stopped the over the bike lane, mid-left turn from Mass Ave southbound onto State, with a cyclist and a bike lying on the ground in front of the bumper.

Barry Rafkind reports that Somerville Voices is looking at bringing "crowd funding" to the city to fund in-depth reporting of the sort he's not seeing in the Somerville Journal or Somerville News.

The basic idea would be to set up a site where investigative journos would post story ideas and then interesting residents could donate money to fund their work. It'd be based on a San Francisco effort called Spot.Us.

Because of its expansion through annexation and land reclamation, and because of the vast differences in size between its neighborhoods, making a web-ready neighborhood map of Boston is extremely difficult. Most online neighborhood maps currently available are simple line drawings or text paste-overs.

I've attempted to solve both these problems by creating a neighborhood map of Boston using Google Maps. It overlays the neighborhood boundaries onto Google's existing maps, and scales easily in and out.

Grafton Times went live today.

As many of you saw yesterday, there was confusion on the Boston Fire Department Twitter feed. I am a Boston Firefighter, and not knowing that the city was intending to set up an official Twitter feed, I set one up to keep those interested informed of fire department happenings around the city. Upon learning that an official Twitter feed was set up, I shut mine down.

Following the success of the Boston Police, The Boston Fire Department is now on Twitter.

www.twitter.com/Boston_Fire

This Twitter feed will be updated with information on citywide fire related emergencies whenever possible. Come join us!