EveryBlock Launches Hyper-local News Service for Big Cities
EveryBlock is a brand new local news aggregator which puts a unique filter on the chaos of city life. It’s only serving three cities upon Wednesday’s launch (Chicago, San Francisco and New York) but more will be added soon.
The site touts itself as "a geographic filter" for your city or your neighborhood. Each of the three city-specific sites serve as an info-hub of sorts, showing the hot stories from local newspapers, radio and television stations as well as local blogs, free weekly papers and independent media sources.
You can even drill down to get neighborhood-specific news. For example, searching for news within 94107 (my office’s ZIP code) returns stories about the new parking structures at the SF Giants ballpark and a Martin Luther King memorial march that happened down the street. Searching within 94110 (where I live) returns stories about the arson committed a few blocks from home last night. How pleasant.
EveryBlock also scrapes public government databases to show information on crime, police activity, public notices and changes to local laws. Lest all that murder and litigation stuff start to get you down, you also get place-tagged Flickr photos, some local Yelp reviews and fun Craigslist posts just to inject a dose of whimsy.
You can grab RSS feeds for any locale, dump them into your reader and keep up to date on who got arrested for what, or just marvel at how nice your neighborhood looks through Flickr’s many lenses.
The site was dreamed up by Adrian Holovaty and Wilson Miner (the same minds who brought you Django, Ellington CMS and ChicagoCrime.org, which we profiled here on Compiler long ago) with development help from Paul Smith and Daniel X. O’Neil. Check out the team’s launch announcement, and follow the EveryBlock blog for news about key updates.
