Idea Lab

EveryBlock Source Code Released

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose. You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps...

• July 1, 2009
• 1 comment

EveryBlock Does Special Report on Corruption Case

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've launched our first EveryBlock "special report" -- an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation "Operation Crooked Code." As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We've been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we've been building the site, we've come across a number of types of information that don't exactly fit the EveryBlock mold....

• June 3, 2008
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EveryBlock FAQ created

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since launching the Knight-funded Web site EveryBlock just over two months ago, we've been asked many questions about the project, from the philosophical ("Why is this 'news'?") to logistical ("When will the code be open-sourced?"). We've compiled the most frequently asked questions into a brand-new FAQ. Check it out....

• April 5, 2008
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EveryBlock Launched

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've launched the first version of our Knight-funded project, EveryBlock. It offers a news feed for every block, neighborhood and ZIP code in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Our launch announcement gives more information about what we're trying to do. We've still got a long way to go, but it's good to have this initial version out the door. Please let us know what you think! You can e-mail us at feedback at everyblock.com....

• January 24, 2008
• 1 comment

Getting Started at EveryBlock

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With my News Challenge grant, I'm starting a project called EveryBlock that aggregates local news for specific cities. We've been working on EveryBlock for a couple of months now, and things are starting to come together nicely. We've got a crack team of four working on the project: designer Wilson Miner, people person Dan O'Neil, developer Paul Smith and yours truly. We're based in Chicago and share office space in the Loop with a great local cartographer and Chicago historian. Our office windows overlook the El tracks -- as Elwood Blues would say, the trains go by "so often that...

• October 14, 2007
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