Miami Student

Issue date: 4/27/07 Section: Community

The Web site, www.collegetownlife.com, gives viewers the ability to preview a college town before visiting a campus and to determine affordability of various residential properties.

What began as a hobby for Miami University business relations associate Bob Karrow is now a comprehensive guide to life in college towns.

Karrow, who works in Miami's DARS center, is the creator and operator of www.collegetownlife.com, a resource for people living in or interested in living in a college town.

According to Karrow, he does not create material to put on the Web site, but rather provides links to many Web sites featuring information on life in a college town.

Some of the topics covered on the site include quality of life in college towns, retiring in a college town, finding affordable student housing, information on businesses in college towns and lists of the best college towns to live in by size, location and affordability.

Karrow said he has lived in several college towns, including Oxford for 15 years. He said participation in neighborhood associations led to an interest in finding information about other college towns.

"It was difficult to find information about what other communities were doing to improve the quality of life," Karrow said.

According to Karrow, he started collecting information about college towns as a hobby in 1985.

"I had it organized and filed, but it wasn't possible to share it in any meaningful sense until the Web was available," Karrow said.

Karrow began sharing information with others as the popularity of the Internet grew. He would send information to people on an individual basis, but realized that a Web site would be a more efficient way to spread the information he found.

"I think I started sharing information in '98, but collegetownlife itself wasn't until early 2005," he said. "Over the past two years the usage of the site has really started to climb and it seems like it will continue to be that way."

Howard Kleiman, Miami professor of communication, said information used to be shared on a one-to-one basis, but now, as a result of the Internet, information can be shared with millions of people simultaneously.

Kleiman echoes Karrow's ideas about the Internet, stating that it has helped information to spread more quickly than other methods of communication.

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