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Eternal Sunshine of the White-Bread Mind
In recent weeks, University of Brighton professor Tara Brarbazon has described Google as "white bread for the mind," bemoaning students' inability to vet online sources found in search engine result lists.
Brabazon's concern is that every piece of online information seems equally valid to her students, who are, she claims, increasingly unwilling or unable to differentiate between refereed work and anecdotal postings.
Her classroom solution: ban online search engines for first-year students, use peer-reviewed articles, and impart what amounts to an academic algorithm for evaluating source material.
Users of local news aggregators such as Outside.in have been plagued with similar problems sorting (seemingly) unweighted information, watching in dismay as local blog posts of varying relevance bury other types of content in aggregated local search results.
Last week, new kid EveryBlock launched as a local, address-specific news aggregator for Chicago, New York, and San Francisco (EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty prefers "address-specific" to "hyperlocal"), offering data from government databases, photo-sharing service Flickr, and Craigslist items alongside local blog posts and local publication news articles.
Like Facebook's labeling of changed profile images, event acceptances, and relationship status as news items in their user feeds, the EveryBlock team defines all geotagged content items as "news." To help with the deluge, EveryBlock delivers neighborhood and ZIP code RSS feeds in a daily digest organized by type, the exception being "news articles," which are delivered individually.
As for exclusive content, EveryBlock surfaces data from government crime and business permit and inspection databases previously unavailable or difficult to locate online. And, somewhat surprisingly, the EveryBlock site does not use Google maps (which powered Holovaty's previous project chicagocrime.org).
What should a local news aggregator include? Do the multiple granulations of EveryBlock equal a more wholesome searching experience?
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