Luxagraf

This is a fantastic interview with Adrian Holovaty, who’s something of a personal hero. His new venture, a hyper-local news site by the name of EveryBlock, is absolutely stunning in the amount of data to puts at your fingertips. Unfortunately it only covers San Francisco, Chicago and New york. A fair bit of my time lately has been devoted to exploring the possibility of putting something similar together for Athens, GA.

After reading this interview though I’ve come to realize that there’s just no way for one person (and certainly not me) to pull that off. Which doesn’t mean I won’t try — stay tuned, I’m hoping to launch something in the next couple of months.

Anyway, if you’re interested in local news and how the internet has the potential to change how you look at your neighborhood, check out EveryBlock and read the interview.

It’s fascinating to follow address-specific breaking news/events on our site. For example, a couple of weeks ago, a water main broke on the north side of Chicago. Afterward, on the relevant EveryBlock pages — for example, Ravenswood or the 1800 block of W. Montrose — you could see a bunch of assorted news items about the incident: newspaper articles from the Trib and Sun-Times, TV station reports and Flickr photos of the torn-up street that were taken by some people who happen to live nearby. Each of those “raw” chunks of information was displayed in the timeline of news for that block.

We’ve seen a similar thing happen with trendy new restaurants. First you see the business license, then (possibly) the liquor license application a few days later, then the restaurant inspection, then a Yelp review or two, then a write-up by the newspaper’s dining critic. The story slowly unfolds over time.

On a completely different note, it’s been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we’ve run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn’t make it any less of a challenge.

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