Mapping mashups have become almost a dime a dozen these days as the release of open APIs by just about every major online mapping site and and development tools has lowered the barriers of entry. That was not always the case though and as recently as 2…

Here in the newsroom today, there’s a lot of excitement about EveryBlock.com. A few professors have wondered if we could perhaps get a demo sometime?

I spent the better part of last night poking around on the site, looking for story ideas to pass along to our business desk. Today, still thinking about what you guys have done, I wrote up a review over on my online journalism blog (click my name above).

The Gist:

There’s lots to like on the site, but what’s got me most excited is the way EveryBlock lowers the barrier to entry for certain genres of citizen journalism.

Chicago’s got some great CTA bloggers because it’s relatively easy to get CTA info. I predict we’ll soon see a bunch of EveryBlock-driven consumer info blogs launching around Chicago, NYC and SF. People will start writing about restaurants that failed inspection/didn’t score a liquor license etc.

But EveryBlock’s not the “key to all mythologies” for hyperlocal news (sorry, I know you hate the term). We’re still missing decent monetization tools for publishers who go local and better quality filters in the site that aggregate local content.

Anyway, enjoy my review, and congrats. It’s fun to see a non-commercial site on Techcrunch that’s head and shoulders above most of the utter pap featured on here.

Brad Flora
Medill School of Journalism
The Chicago Methods Reporter

City center data is nice - but more people live in the suburbs of Chicago than in Cook County, right?

So what will take to upgrade the Chicago service to benefit the larger bowl?

Would be a much better model going forward to consider that regions like Chicago are actually defined as a six county region by data collectors and news gatherers.

Plus if you looked at the pie this way - you would also get the No. 2 and No. 3 cities in Illinois in your data set and be far more valuable to all users.

Thanks, my neighbor!

Robb Montgomery

Perhaps you shouldn’t be commenting on Design & Marketing elements if you got your nose buried in code all day. Stick to what you know and be respectful of others’ work.

Great job on the site EveryBlock team.

Keep up the great work.

And behold, I am correct.
This might just be because a search on Hyde Park came up with about 30 crime listings and 2 news stories.
Oh U of C, how I miss thee.

It drives me up the wall that “iGoogle” shows me a map that’s centered around alcatraz when it starts up. 99% of us don’t live in the bay area and don’t give a damn about it.

you mean i should check back every day and wait for something that interests me to show?

Everyblock launched 1/23, one year to the day that the domain was registered, just one of a great many signs that indicate that Everyblock has a well defined plan and clear course of action. It’s an *extremely* impressive site on many levels and …

Also, I’d encourage you to take another look at our sources to reconsider your statement that “[a]ll of this content is being pulled from other sites like Yelp for flickr.” NYC crime stats previously were only available in PDF format on an obscure NYPD page, and we’ve done the work of extracting the data from them. Demolition permits (did you notice a building near you, at 13 E. 31st, just got a demolition permit yesterday?) are only available on a NYC government site that requires you to enter a permit number to search. Same goes for restaurant inspections, graffiti and building violations in New York.

Point is, although we’re nowhere near the number of data sources we’d like in the long term, we’re still really proud of how many sets of public records we’ve liberated already.

Of course, the more data sources we add, the tougher it is to help people wade through the sea of data. It’s one of the many interesting problems we look forward to solving!

Thanks for your feedback –
Adrian @ EveryBlock

5 random photos of people in the hospital and/or real estate pics of buildings.
1 building permit
3 crome reports
16 random photos listed under “news”

All of this content is being pulled from other sites like Yelp for flickr.

Although the interface is clean and nice, it doesnt really give me any useful data. The reviews are displayed in a way that take triple the amount of clicks to go from one to the next as opposed to going to yelp itself.

Just seems like a pointless collection of datapoints being pulled from other services and slapped together in a nice skin.

Try my neighborhood: zip code: 10016

More Web 2.0 B.S.= not a business.

Still a bit meh on the idea though. Perhaps I’d feel different if it was more relevant to me (Tokyo version) but I guess they need to stem growth initially.