Urban Honking
Urban Honking was an invitation-only blog collective based in Portland, Oregon, founded around 2001 by Mike Merrill, Steve Schroeder, and Jona Bechtolt (later known as one half of YACHT). Described by Willamette Week as “a blog of blogs,” it operated for nearly two decades before the domain expired around 2019. The site ran on a budget of roughly $500 per year plus $130 per month in office rent, carried no advertising, and generated no revenue.
Overview
Urban Honking provided bloggers with an instant readership within a curated community. Mike described the value proposition directly: “If you just set up shop on the Internet, you’re going to be writing in the dark for a long time. On Urban Honking, you have an instant audience.” Steve Schroeder framed the editorial philosophy in broadcast terms: “We think of it like we’re programming a TV network.”
At its peak, the site drew over 6,000 unique visitors per day. Membership was selective. New bloggers were invited by existing members, and the resulting community became a talent pipeline for media, technology, and culture.
Notable Alumni
Urban Honking produced a disproportionate number of people who went on to prominent careers:
- Claire Evans, co-founder of YACHT and author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
- Greg Borenstein, developer who built the KmikeyM platform, later at Riot Games
- Adrian Chen, staff writer at The New Yorker
- Andrea Chalupa, co-host of the Gaslit Nation podcast
In a 2013 Salon piece, Adrian Chen described Urban Honking as representative of the pre-Facebook era when strangers formed real friendships online through shared writing.
Ultimate Blogger
Urban Honking’s largest public-facing project was Ultimate Blogger, a reality-TV-style blogging competition. Contestants competed through writing challenges, with readers voting on eliminations.
- Season 1 (2005): Established the format
- Season 2 (2006): Expanded the audience
- Season 3 (2007): Received 117,000 applications for 8 spots. The competition was part of Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), sharing a festival lineup with Mikhail Baryshnikov.
The scale of Season 3 applications relative to the site’s modest infrastructure illustrated a recurring Urban Honking pattern: cultural influence far exceeding its budget.
The Name
The name was coined by Steve Schroeder. Mike has said he was drawn to it because of his childhood in Coldfoot, Alaska, where he and his brother would stand beside the Dalton Highway and make the arm-pumping gesture at passing truck drivers to get them to honk their air horns.
Relationship to KmikeyM
Urban Honking was the community that made KmikeyM possible. When Mike launched his personal IPO in January 2008, the first shareholders were Urban Honking friends and collaborators. Greg Borenstein, who held 500 shares and built the KmikeyM trading platform, was an Urban Honking member. The social trust and shared history within the blog collective provided the foundation for an experiment that required people to invest real money in another person’s decisions.
The Vasectomy Vote, the defining early KmikeyM shareholder resolution, drew many of its participants from the Urban Honking network.
Scholarship
In 2010, the Urban Honking founders launched a $1,000 college freshman scholarship funded through Kickstarter. The project carried an irony the founders acknowledged: none of the three co-founders (Mike, Steve, or Jona) held a college degree.
Economics and Philosophy
Urban Honking was never monetized. The founders were explicit about this being a deliberate choice, not an oversight. As Mike put it: “If we tried to monetize it, it would be a complete disaster.” The site’s value was social and reputational, not financial.
Alternet wrote in 2005 that having an Urban Honking blog was “like owning a chic Fendi handbag,” a comparison that captured both the exclusivity and the absurdity of status within a niche blogging community.
Legacy
Urban Honking ran for approximately eighteen years. It predated and outlasted the rise of social media platforms that eventually absorbed its function. The site demonstrated that a small, curated community with no business model could produce lasting cultural output and launch careers. Its closest spiritual descendants are invite-only Discord servers and small-group Substacks, though none have replicated the specific mix of editorial curation, competitive spectacle, and Portland weirdness that defined Urban Honking.
The military service and remote Alaskan childhood that shaped Mike’s early life are covered in their own articles.
References
- Clique Here — Willamette Week, 2006
- Voted Off the Internet — Alternet, 2005
- Urban Honking Dot Com — Bloomberg, 2006
- Ultimate Blogger 3 — CNET, 2007
- When the Internet Was for Strangers — Salon, 2013