Geek...No, Really, It's a Compliment

Durham is often lauded, be it for its businesses, hospitals, food, art, theaters, festivals, lifestyle, and more.  But this latest one is special...really special.  Durham is receiving acclaim for being geeky.

Research Triangle Park is surrounded on three sides by the city of Durham with a small portion that spills into Wake county towards Morrisville and Apex. RTP is the home to some of the nation's biggest, smartest and most innovative businesses.  It, alongside many of Durham's other university and entrepreneurial assets make this ranking pretty clear.  Geeky or not, Durham is a true brain trust stronghold.

There is an accepted definition of geeky that was used for this ranking in Forbes. From the US National Science Foundation, a geek is defined as as any worker with a bachelor’s level of knowledge and education in science or engineering-related fields or workers in occupations that require some degree of technical knowledge or training, according to the Forbes article.

Lest readers be confused, here is a bit of an explanation to help clarify the ranking.  The city of Durham does not stand alone in this list - the rank is actually of MSAs, or Metropolitan Statistical Areas.  The one in which Durham lies, the Durham, NC MSA is actually made up of four counties: Chatham, Durham, Orange and Person.  Read between the lines and our close neighbor Chapel Hill deserves some credit here of which they were stripped by omission in the listing. 

The article references  the "Raleigh-Durham-Cary area" which is not an MSA, but a CMSA, or grouping of adjacent MSAs.  It is an all too common practice for rankings to say they are of cities and to actually be of MSAs.  Frankly, it's lazy journalism not to explain the difference, and an affront to readers that the media think the concept is too difficult to grasp and not germane to the facts of the story.  The Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB), as Durham's official marketing agency and monitor of Durham's image, always likes to clarify the distinction.

"Rankings are low hanging fruit for the media.  They are easy to produce, highly subjective and can be built on just about any parameter or criteria to fit the need of the author," said Sam Poley, Director of Marketing and Communications at DCVB.  "Print media are weathering the economy poorly, their staff's are dwindling, and rankings sell.  We're always happy to be listed in quality rankings and we always dig into the methodology of a ranking to ensure that the science at least has some merit, as it does in this case," he added.

All Durham rankings and accolades are indexed on a database and searchable online at the Durham Accolades website maintained by DCVB.

Thanks to Durham blog Bull City Rising for being early out of bed today to report this news.  As usual, their work is exhaustive and complete.

New "Durham Hoods" site showcases neighborhoods, listservs across Durham

Durham is very fortunate to have local bloggers who share great information and insight into the goings on in the place where great things happen - bloggers like Kevin Davis at Bull City Rising.  Read below for his great piece on http://www.durhamhoods.com/.

New "Durham Hoods" site showcases neighborhoods, listservs across Durham
Bull City Rising
Kevin Davis

When Philip Bost's car was broken into in the Duke Park neighborhood, Bost got mad.

Getting even? Not so much. Getting neighbors informed? Yes, please.

Bost decided to reach out to his fellow 'hoodsters to let them know about what happened to his car. "I felt like I had an obligation after that event to notify my neighbors and my community that this type of thing was going on, and I was also curious about whether I was an isolated case," Bost said. "It felt personal, but now I know that it's not. These things happen."

He hadn't previously been signed on to or active on Duke Park's listserv, which is one of the more engaged and active in the Bull City.

(For the uninitiated, it has fewer bizarro flame wars than some other central Durham lists I could name -- discretion is the better part of valor for local bloggers -- though delinquent street sweepers and drivers bypassing the vehicular barriers to the neighborhood's namesake park should beware the e-wrath they'll find.)

Bost's venture onto the Duke Park listserv to share his crime experience got him wondering. How many other neighborhoods had listservs? How active were they? And, where could you go to find out more about all of Durham's sometimes-charming, sometimes-exhausting email lists?

His concern grew when a missing child report hit the police and Old North Durham listserv recently, but the email's author didn't know how to get the report passed along to the Duke Park list, despite the girl disappearing less than 50 yards from the neighborhood boundary.

The result? Durhamhoods.com, Bost's new site featuring a Google Map mashup of all the Durham neighborhoods he could identify, complete with links and engagement data on neighborhood associations' lists.

Continue reading this blog post...

The Latest Iteration of Being a Startup Hub

Durham has always been a hub for startups...even before 1865 when Washington Duke came home after the Civil War and started in the tobacco business.  Seems to have worked out for him since with that modest start, Durham proceeded to lead the industrial revolution in the south with both tobacco and textile empires thriving here for the century to follow.

Now, in some of the very same buildings that housed those former manufacturing giants, Durham is again expressing its entrepreneurial nature as a massive influx of creative and business minded people come here to get their ideas off the ground.

The last several years have seen the startup landscape flourish in Durham, and the future is looking more lush every day.  With the recent opening of Bull City Forward as an incubator for social enterprises, and the impending opening of American Underground as a similar environment for tech companies, Durham is fast-tracking its growth in this direction.  Click here for a recent article on the subject.  Even the local blog Bull City Rising now has an editorial series devoted to this subject and a new correspondent focused on this beat.

"To call it exciting is an understatement.  We've always been a technology and innovation hub--after all RTP started here in 1959--but now we're seeing opportunities for small operations to call Durham home in a new way," said Shelly Green, President and CEO of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.  "The fact is that more than 80% of relocating executives come to Durham as visitors first and then decide to move here.  We're now seeing the natural evolution of that with a previous generation setting the stage for newcomers to get their concepts off the ground here.  Durham is a place where great things happen, and we're hoping these businesses will stay in Durham," she added.

BCF and AU are only part of the picture.  There is a startup subculture in Durham, a place that often wins accolades for various aspects of its population.  See a searchable database of those here.  A new website, http://www.downtowndurhamstartups.com/, sponsored by shoeboxed.com, is a great clearing house for information on new businesses getting underway in Durham, but also in the surrounding area.  Their blog can be seen here.

Pursuant to being attractive to a younger demographic, Durham has an exciting dining scene with more than three dozen nationally celebrated restaurants, bakeries and food trucks for near round the clock options.  There is even a website devoted entirely to coffee shops and bakeries that rates them based on various criteria.  There is also a fare-free bus, The Bull City Connector, that services downtown Durham as some immediately adjacent parts of town including Duke and North Carolina Central Universities.

A visit to the official website for Durham's marketing agency sums up the current culture pretty well, "Durham is a colorful, creative, and entrepreneurial community and is the proud home of Research Triangle Park, Duke and North Carolina Central universities."  Sounds like startup mecca.