Phillip Bost of Duke Park has now taken the city one cyber-step farther to put neighborhoods and their e-mail lists in touch with each other.

It's durhamhoods.com - an interactive map showing where more than 60 neighborhood organizations are, linked to the e-mail list of each organization that has one.

The idea, he said, is that there are times when one neighborhood might like to know about something going on in another, like a furniture giveaway. And there are emergencies when one neighborhood needs to let its neighbors know about something, like a missing child.

That happened in January, Bost said - an 8-year-old went missing. E-mail alerts went out to her neighborhood and to the police, but no one thought or knew how to get in touch with the e-mail list of a neighborhood next door - where the child was eventually found, safe.

"There are a lot of instances where what's going on in one neighborhood was right next to another," he said, but "a lack of cross-posting [to e-mail lists] when there really needed to be cross-posting."

At least one Durham police officer has taken note of Bost's project. Sgt. Dale Gunter, who works in police District 2 that includes Duke Park, said Bost sent him the link and he has forwarded it to other officers and the district captain.

"I think it's pretty exciting," said InterNeighborhood Council President Tom Miller. "Needs some work, but what doesn't?"

Bost has only lived in Durham for a little more than a year. He moved in to take a contracting job with the Environmental Protection Agency after graduating from N.C. State in 2009.

"It's an amazing place," he said.

One amazing element, Bost said, is Durham's number of neighborhood e-mail lists. "It's hard to research, but my understanding so far is that we're outshining New York City, Washington, D.C., and Portland [Ore.] in terms of neighborhood e-mail lists per capita," he said.

A community so well connected must have a central directory for e-mail lists, Bost thought. But, once he started searching, he found there wasn't one. So he created durhamhoods.com to "enhance connectivity," he said.

"If connectivity is the key to livable communities, this takes it to a whole new level," said Bill Anderson, also a Duke Park resident and a leader in Durham's Partners Against Crime organization.

Besides private citizens, Bost said his site could help police. He said some officers he knows subscribe to neighborhood e-mail lists to keep up with the local news.

"A lot of property crimes and things of that nature are not being called in [to police], but are being reported in the neighborhoods," he said.

Durhamhoods.com has been live since Feb. 12, but it remains a work in progress. Bost wants to make sure every neighborhood organization has a link on his page, and ensure that Internet search engines will pick it up for anyone looking for a neighborhood by name.

Bost is not a Web designer or programmer, and this is his first attempt at creating an Internet site.

"I did it with free software just available online," he said.