Ever wanted to hear a celebrity’s answering machine recording, or know which prominent New Yorker has a twin? A new Web site, Cityfile.com, is putting such information at easy reach.

Founded by a former Radar magazine online editor, Remy Stern, 33, Cityfile.com made its debut earlier this week. The privately funded site is part database and part Web log, featuring in-depth profiles of the city’s “most notable” residents, and updates on their day-to-day lives on its Dailyfile page. The site currently features 2,109 profiles that viewers can browse by 27 industry categories, or by lists ranging from “Gun license” to “Generously proportioned.”

“People are really interested in the web of relationships and connections,” Mr. Stern, a native New Yorker, said. Likening it to a guidebook of New York residents, he said, “It’s a look at the city through the people who shape the culture, make the city what it is, influence what we read, what we eat, where we shop.”

While the site’s Dailyfile page falls along the lines of gossip blogs such as Gawker.com, its Cityfile data fills a different niche within the universe of blogs. Its database of profiles is reminiscent of Wikipedia, except the pages cannot be directly edited by viewers. A couple of minutes on the site’s list function garners such information as that both Mariska Hargitay and Tina Fey have scars, and that Jennifer Connelly and Russell Simmons are vegans.

Mr. Stern calls the site a “great resource for journalists, media, and New Yorkers.”

Cityfile has the edge necessary for success in New York City, the publisher of the real estate site Curbed.com, Lockhart Steele, said. “New York has always had a really vibrant blog scene that really started with Gawker,” he said, adding that in the last year or so Gawker has broadened and is less New York City-centric.

About a dozen freelancers compiled Cityfile’s initial database, but did not personally interview any of the featured New Yorkers, Mr. Stern said, adding that the site will continue to evolve over time; profiles will be added and also dropped.

As Cityfile matures, it will rely heavily on user contributions, he said. Registered users can upload photos and suggest corrections to the site’s profiles, although they cannot directly alter any of its biographies. They may also post comments, track the people they are most interested in, and even rate featured New Yorkers on a 1-to-100 scale.

“Think of it as an approval rating,” Mr. Stern said.

The site has a small staff, including a handful of photographers who are dispatched throughout the city to photograph people eating out at restaurants, or to snap shots of homes, according to Mr. Stern. Photographs taken by the freelancers will have a star placed on the corner, to differentiate them from those that are user-uploaded.

The nascent blog has already garnered some attention among fellow bloggers, particularly a photo showing Eliot Spitzer at his daughter’s pre-prom party.

Although the site publicizes details of private lives, including home addresses, experts say that the site is not an unlawful invasion of privacy.

“People overestimate the amount of privacy protection the law gives,” a lawyer at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Wendy Seltzer, said. “Celebrities and public figures have even less of an expectation of privacy.”

The information available on Cityfile is “not so secret,” Mr. Stern said. “All we did was aggregate it.”