Georgetown, home of my favorite bar in Seattle, is a mix of grit and artsy hip. It’s also home to many people who can tune out the sound of Boeing Field’s myriad of incoming and outgoing flights a day and, apparently, one very political blogger and a not-so-frequent Seattle PI blogger.

Georgetown is so cool that a Beacon Hill blogger adopted it (she sez: “My blog was supposed to be about Beacon Hill, but nothing ever happens here. So it’s turned into more of a Georgetown blog.”). The Estately Beacon Hill outline is a little screwy, but Ms. Beacon Hill really betrays her need for local content when she says “It’s one of the largest neighborhoods in Seattle, and we don’t even have a Starbucks (not that we want one).” In Seattle? Just a mile or two from Starbucks’ world headquarters? How can that be? Does she mean no 2 Starbucks within 5 blocks of each other? Starbucks blog, please tell us!

I like tiny, single purpose web apps, even if I immediately forget their names. Here’s my app of the day: a.placebetween.us. Give it 2 or more addresses and what you are meeting about and it will give you suggestions right in the middle of your places. Note: not that helpful if you are a Seattleitte meeting with Eastsiders.

via: Brian Dorsey (founder of NoonHat), who faintly reminds me of Dustin Luther.

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Just a quick reminder that now that Leopard Day has come and past, Estately will continue to delight you in Apple Safari (and Firefox and Internet Explorer).

The trend towards small, efficient startups like Menuism, 37Signals, and the Robot Co-op and a host of other small, unfunded or minimally funded startups is forcing venture capitalists to scrounge for non-traditional investments (halfway down the page).

ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS The blog VentureBeat has been following the venture capitalists scrounging for alternatives to technology investments as free-falling costs have drastically cut the need for outside financing. This week, Eric Eldon noted that Kleiner Perkins took part in a $50 million investment in YesPPG, a shirt factory in Shanghai (venturebeat.com).

There is no doubt that it takes money to start a company (although it doesn’t take much for a web-site!), but one has to wonder if it really takes $20 million+ to provide an outstanding experience to consumers like our massively funded competitors seem to believe.

For those wincing at the cost of Seattle homes that cost an average of $374 per square foot, I’d like to point out that they are a relative deal when placed next to New York’s approximate $1,000 per square foot prices (!!!). Seattle per square foot condo prices are higher - $521 per square foot ($540,556 average price, 1,037 sqft average size).

You might think this is in reference to the positive reviews that greeted our low profile release last week or maybe a post about Tacoma schools but no, this is a post about your browser.

Firefox, a free web browser you can download here, “schooled” the competition when it came out November 9th, 2004 (so recently!). Why? Because it loaded pages faster than everyone, didn’t randomly screw up pages like internet exploder and it worked on Macs and Linux too.

It still schools the competition today. Here’s why:

• It is still faster
• Plugins like AdBlock declutter sites and make you ask questions like “how does this company make money?” (lists of good extensions are abundant)
• For anyone who makes websites: Firebug
• It’s free.

There are hidden costs to Internet Explorer that no one talks about: I posit that Internet Explorer is actually a significant drain on the economy. Half of our releases are complicated and slowed by Internet Explorer’s annoying quirks.

So if you haven’t already, download Firefox! At the very least, Estately will look better for you.

If you have a big screen, Estately is one of the only real estate search sites that will fill it up with real estate search goodness. Small screen? We shrink to your level unless it’s tiny. Seriously: go to Estately’s Seattle real estate page now and try resizing your browser - see how everything scales to fit your needs? Regardless, some people have asked us for even more map and even more room for photos and today we deliver, but only if they really want it.

Hanging out between the map and the search options is a little triangle in a long thin bar. Click on it and Huzzah! the map is full screen. Once you’ve set up your search, you can shrink that sucker down and just cruise the map, going from listings to photos to neighborhood information. Want it back? The same bar is still hanging out on the left side of the map. Click it again and Huzzah! it’s like it was never gone.

Before:

After:

Isn’t there a word for something that’s both more and better? Mobetta? If so, we are today launching mobetta neighborhood and city information pages to give potential home buyers a real feel for the neighborhood and to give sellers marketing points they didn’t know existed. I’ll just jump to what’s both more and better:

Best and worst schools for every neighborhood and city in Washington. Check out the schools in West Seattle for instance. Also included in this release are detail pages for every school in Washington.

Once you find the school you absolutely must live near (lets say Ballard High School) you’re only one click away from seeing the properties for sale within walking distance.

For instance:

We’ve boiled schools down to three simple things: where they are, what school district they are in, and the math and school scores for the student body. We hope to encourage conversation about the specifics of each school and district (like posts about which loony toons were elected to the board) sometime soon.

Just remember, school scores aren’t everything - they should be used as a starting point (Bellevue students are better at reading and they have the International Baccalaureate, for the record). We can recommend local Realtors who really know the local schools if you want to know more about your local schools.

We also added information about parks and places (restaurants, statues, anything of interest) for every neighborhood and city. Thanks to the Robots at Forty Three Places, you can see that Paseo is the best reason to live in Fremont. My recommendation: live two miles away so you can walk through Ross Playground and work off half of the meal.

We’re ironing out a couple of bugs as I type. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions in the comments.