Driving through my neighborhood one might get the notion that some Love Canal-style industrial accident or unearthly science fiction events had occurred in the vicinity due to the volume of "For Sale" signs popping up in the past few weeks.

The panic, of course, is fostered not by toxic waste, alien invasion or paranormal activity. It's simply fear of the dreaded "Housing Bubble."

Homeowners imagine the bubble lathering into their neighborhood like the infamous Blob from the movie of the same name, gobbling up not only their children, pets and neighbors when it bursts, but something just about as important: their equity.

But if folks were to pay attention and look more closely, they might notice something else appearing atop all those For Sale signs, such as smaller plaques that read "In Escrow," "Sale Pending" or even "Sold." And all of the selling neighbors I talked to weren't fleeing in fright, they were moving up to a bigger home.

No, the homes aren't selling as quickly as they have in the past, but they are selling, which implies that for every seller who believes there is a housing bubble, there are buyers who either disagree or don't care.

This difference of opinion has fostered a booming topic for online blogs and Web sites.

Everybody's favorite investment topic gets dozens of related blogs on blogspot.com, a site where anybody can launch their own pages with little or no skill, risk or expertise in the position they are advocating.

There's http://bubbletracking.blogspot.com, http://housingpanic.blogspot.com, http://bubblemeter.blogspot.com, http://ushousingbubble.blogspot.com, http://thehousingbubble.blogspot.com and even http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com for those who didn't get enough doom and gloom from the first site.

One self-proclaimed expert has even created http://socalbubble.blogspot.com just for the Southern California market, and another built one for our fair county at http://sandiegohousingbubble.blogspot.com.

Some folks feel so strongly about the subject they start whole sites dedicated to persuading you to sell now before it's too late. They include http://patrick.net/wp, http://www.housingbubblebust.com, http://housebubble.com and the perpetually popular Professor Piggington's Econ-Almanac for the Landed Poor at http://econo-almanac.com. Note, each includes plenty of ads offering to help you sell that nest egg-killer of a home of yours.

The oft-made argument that renting is more cost effective than buying can be explored with tools such as the Housing Cost Calculator at www.cepr.net/calculators/hb/hcc.html. However no matter how I played with the numbers, the calculator favored renting over buying.

A lot of the equation depends on where housing prices really are going. Indeed a recent economic forecast by local experts indicated housing prices would either drop 5 percent or gain 5 percent in the coming year. Either way the change would seem negligible compared to any sort of predicted burst contemplated on the more popular blogs.

When it comes down to it, folks have to make their own predictions, using sites like www.realtor.com or this paper's own www.ncthomes.com to check prices or inventory or sites such as www.domania.com to see recent comparable sales prices.

Andrew Kleske is online editor for the North County Times. E-mail him at kleske@nctimes.com.