Karl would like you to know there’s no “s” at the end of Spring—that’s why he named his blog Silver Spring, Singular. “It references the fact that the name of my neighborhood is erroneously pluralized by nearly everyone outside of the Washington area—and many inside as well.”

Karl, who keeps his last name under wraps, grew up in Silver Spring and moved back after college in 2006. He started blogging several years later when he discovered that almost every Washington neighborhood had a blog except Silver Spring. Three years later, he’s hit his groove. Karl says he has a core group of readers who follow him week to week, but traffic spikes when his neighborhood makes headlines. He writes about anything and everything Silver Spring—from crime to development to entertainment. “Restaurants are always a very popular topic,” he says.

We caught up with Karl recently to explore his neck of the woods. Read on to find out everything you ever wanted to know about Silver Spring—including the time it rained money.

When Melissa McCart lived in New York, she was a freelance writer who focused on the arts. She moved to Washington to teach high-school English but wanted to keep her writing skills sharp. “I missed New York restaurants and was convinced DC had many of a similar caliber,” she says. “I learned the restaurant landscape and started a blog.”

McCart’s blog, Counter Intelligence, is ground zero for news on the local and national dining scenes. She posts interviews with chefs, information about food-related events, her favorite food-and-wine pairings, and, every Wednesday, roundups of the best food articles from magazines and newspapers. On top of her blog, McCart regularly freelances. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Times, and The Washingtonian.

We caught up with this dining maven to find out the best food-and-wine pairing she’s tried in Washington, her favorite cocktail, and the craziest thing she’s ever done in the name of reporting. Read on for her answers.

Michele Ginnerty’s blog, My Notting Hill, started in January 2008 as part of a New Year’s resolution. She was looking for an outlet for her thoughts and insights on interior design, and a blog seemed to make sense. “I think my family and friends were secretly hoping I’d buy less design magazines, but it didn’t have that effect,” she says.

For the past 14 years, Ginnerty has run a management-consulting firm, so blogging is a new hobby. It’s also a way, she says, to exercise her creative side. On her blog, which is named for her favorite London neighborhood, Ginnerty posts photos of patterns, designs, and rooms that inspire her. When traveling for business, she tries to make time to visit local home-decor shops and eclectic neighborhoods. She’s even been known to enlist family members to do scouting for her.

We caught up with this wife and mother of two—“My family has put up with a lot of design projects and changes over the years,” she says—to pick her mind about design challenges. How to make a small room look bigger? Tips for landlord-friendly apartment decor? Where to find good secondhand home items? Read on for her answers.

In 2003, Amy Storch was working as a managing editor for a financial-newsletter publishing company. “It was every bit as exciting as it sounds,” she says. Looking for a creative outlet—one in which she could be “funny, foul-mouthed, and not such a stickler for proper comma usage”—Storch decided to make her blogging debut. Using a nickname a coworker had given her, Amalah (pronounced Aim-uh-lah) was born.

When she started the blog, Storch was a married, child-free, 25-year-old DC resident. Six years later, she’s a suburban stay-at-home mom with two boys, Noah and Ezra. Her blog content has changed along with her life: While she once compared herself to a carefree, perfectly coiffed Carrie Bradshaw, now she takes a page from Erma Bombeck, the late suburban-housewife humorist. Storch’s near-daily posts run the gamut from hilarious tales of laptop meltdowns to cheek-pinchingly-cute baby pictures to bittersweet anecdotes about coping with ailing parents and raising a special-needs child.

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of Storch’s readers are women, though she says men will occasionally cop to perusing her pages. Among her female demographic, Storch says about half are moms: “I guess they read either to get their baby-photo fix or as a reminder to take their birth control.” Amalah.com sees about 250,000 visitors a month.

In addition to her own blog, Storch pens parenting columns on Alphamom.com and Mamapop.com. Last year, she contributed to Sleep Is for the Weak, an award-winning anthology of essays by mommy bloggers.

We caught up with this busy mom recently to dish about parenting in Washington. We found out how she’s enjoying suburban life (hint: not so much), what she might have named a daughter, and where she goes for an adults-only night out. Read on for her answers.

Washington’s blogging community is one man down today: Our old pal Arjewtino has announced he’s calling it quits. In late February, he decided to take some time off from his blogging routine, telling readers, “No, I’m not retiring and, no, I am not trapped under anything heavy . . . I just need to unplug.”

Days turned into weeks, and after nearly a month and a half with no new updates, Arjewtino says he’s done: “I thought after not doing it for a few weeks that I’d be itching to get back to it. Instead, I felt relief not to have to do it anymore.”

Arjewtino wrote more than 360 entries over nearly three years, dishing up hilarious anecdotes about his life as a sports-crazed Argentinean Jew. We first interviewed Arjewtino last November for this column and loved his writing so much that we enlisted him twice for guest posts (read them here and here). When he told us last week that he was planning to retire Arjewtino.com, we cried—just kidding, but we were more than a little sad. Luckily, we were able to talk him into doing one final interview before he signed off for good.

And so, fellow Arjewtino fans, here are your favorite blogger’s parting words. Read on for Arjewtino’s thoughts about his time in the spotlight, what he plans to do next—hint: another blog!—and lots more.

Matt Rhoades and his pup, Lupe, on the corner of 15th and Corcoran streets, Northwest. Photograph by Luis Gomez 

Matt Rhoades launched his blog, Borderstan, in August 2008 to help give voice to a neighborhood he thought was lost in translation—not quite Dupont Circle, not quite Logan Circle, but somewhere in between. The blog was an outgrowth of an informal group composed of Rhoades and his neighbors that formed in 2006 in order to get better police coordination and patrols in the neighborhood.

Rhoades points to one incident in particular that prompted the group to organize: A man who lived at 15th and Corcoran streets, Northwest, spotted a drug deal happening near his home. He saw a police car parked nearby and flagged down the officer. Rhoades says the man asked the cop if he was going to do anything to stop the deal but was told that he couldn’t intervene because the deal was happening in a different police service area—even though it was just on the other side of the street. The man was outraged, and Rhoades says word of the incident spread quickly. Soon after, Borderstan Neighbors was born.

After three years of working with the District, Borderstan Neighbors has developed a close relationship with the two police districts that patrol the area. Officers from the bordering districts now coordinate activities, and Rhoades says the group regularly orchestrates get-togethers with the district commanders. They also work closely with the assistant chief of the Patrol Services Bureau, Diane Groomes. “It shows what you can do if you work together and simply refuse to go away,” says Rhoades.

As for the name “Borderstan,” Rhoades says he gets flak for it—people argue that it’s disrespectful of the “Stan” countries—but he doesn’t want to change it. “It works,” he says. “People remember it.”

We caught up with Rhoades recently to find out more about this boundary-straddling neighborhood. Best bar? Worst condo building? Most bizarre crime? Read on for his answers.