EveryBlock
The tools we're building to find, aggregate and consume tailored, filtered and hyperlocalized information are still nascent. My motto: register for everything, see what sticks. In the last few months, I've been hooked to EveryBlock, which lets you dive deep via street address and zip code, or pull back for city-wide look. The amount of data that's fine-sliced by location, neighborhood and zip code is just amazing. Beyond mentions of specific hoods in the mainstream media or blogs (including Yelp restaurant reviews), what EveryBlock does really well is provide a user-friendly, easy-to-digest interface for exploring public records: every building permit, restaurant inspection, police call, zoning agenda item and more. You can hone searches from a one- to eight-block radius around a particular address. And you can set daily/weekly email alerts, as well (I prefer a weekly update, but search via the site now and again).
There are handful of news-y aggregators like Placeblogger (which I've not tried) and Outside.In (which I enjoy). Much like the previously-reviewed PopUrls, Outside.In gives you one place to go (or email/RSS) to monitor a variety of outlets -- in this case location-specific "news, views and conversations" slotted into categories like food, music, real estate. Good stuff, but a little different. With EveryBlock, you get the actual public records, which tend to provide the most interesting tidbits, for me at least. In addition to suspicious people alerts, car break-ins and violent crimes, I discovered a person on my block is intending to tear down a one-story, single-family home and build a four-story condo -- yuck! (Beware: you really can spend hours with all this data.)
The only catch: EveryBlock is only available in 11 cities (as I write), but more are certainly on the way. If you're using any similar sites/services you love -- especially those covering areas EveryBlock does not -- please tell us about them in the comments below.
Favorite (15)
Jared
Thanks for the review of outside.in. I'm glad you see the value in our destination site. You might also check out our StoryMaps for bloggers through GeoToolkit (http://outside.in/geotoolkit) and Neighborhood News Pages for partners on sites like http://nbcchicago.com/news, where headlines and links to our GeoToolkit members' stories are distributed.
If you want to keep track of us, here's a post about where we're headed with our business: http://bit.ly/14SAwc
Adrian Holovaty
Thanks for the nice writeup, Steven. Lots of interesting things are in the works at EveryBlock, including expansion to more cities, as you suggested.
For those of you who want to bring EveryBlock to your own town: you can place a vote at the http://www.everyblock.com/ homepage (click "Don't see your city?"). Some winners are emerging, but we'll be continuing to keep an eye on the results.
Adrian @ EveryBlock
Tristan Phillips
Outside.in still needs work. It misidentifies some Zip codes (Eg: Cortland, NY [13045] is not in Tompkins County) and gets lost on others (Eg: 13201 is not identified as being in Syracuse, NY).
I'm sure the site will improve, but I do expect the basics to work even if there's no news/items for the area.
Jared
Tristan, I'll look into those zip code misallocations for you. We are moving away from zip code navigation in favor of neighborhoods, towns, and addresses. You can use Radar (outside.in/radar) to get news within 1,000 feet of your address. You can also navigate directly to Cortland and Syracuse at http://outside.in/cortland_ny and http://outside.in/syracuse_ny.
In general you can always go directly to a city or town by entering the url with the following format: http://outside.in/[City Name]_[state abbreviation]. To go directly to a neighborhood, just add the nabe name before the city name, like this: http://outside.in/[nabe name]_[city name]_[state abbv.]. Or just skip all that and go to outside.in/radar.
Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.
And thank you, Steven and Kevin, for hosting this customer service session. ;-)
Justin
It's also worth noting that EveryBlock is planning to release the source to their underlying application when their grant funding runs out this summer:
http://www.everyblock.com/about/faq/#business
So if your town is too small to get approved, you will be able to roll your own. It'll be interesting to see how folks put the software to use.
Lisa Williams
Thank you, Steven. One point of commonality that many may not know is that both Placeblogger and Everyblock were funded in part by the Knight Foundation, which funds innovative projects to provide local news and information in an era when many newspapers are experiencing tough times or even going out of business.
Knight runs a program called the Knight 21st Century News Challenge, where people who have ideas can apply for funding, at newschallenge.org