Idea Lab

Adrian Holovaty Talks about EveryBlock Sale to MSNBC.com

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The big news last week was that Knight-funded startup EveryBlock was bought by MSNBC.com for an undisclosed sum. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty is one of the Idea Lab bloggers, and has been a pioneering programmer/journalist at the Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., and at the Washington Post. There had been some online scuttlebutt around the way EveryBlock released its open source code, and then was bought by MSNBC.com, so I thought it would be a good idea to go straight to the source, with a Q&A with Holovaty himself. The following interview took place over email, and included a couple questions...

• August 25, 2009
• 11 comments

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

Rethinking Community Information Needs

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Following up on the Knight Commission's work and musings on "community information needs in a democracy", Mark glaser poses a much more targeted question which has yet to be fully addressed: "What is missing in terms of local community needs"? Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs. But what about the folks that are not at...

• May 5, 2009
• 3 comments

Partnerships to Watch (and a Crowdsourcing Project I'm Envying)

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps. Speaking of EveryBlock, they recently announced that they're working with the New York Times to track Times reporting on political districts. Presumably they'll be taking advantage of the...

• January 29, 2009
• 1 comment

Obama's Open Government Imperatives Must Trickle Down to Cities

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today President Obama issued two eloquent orders with the following subject lines: "Freedom of Information Act" and "Transparency and Open Government". Published on the first full day of his presidency, they constitute a sweeping manifesto about how he wants to govern at the Federal level. Those leading municipal government in this country-- mayors, commissioners, and department heads-- would do well to read closely. Change is coming. In the first memo, he writes that "the Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." He goes on to "direct the Director of...

• January 21, 2009
• 3 comments

Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently in Chicago, as the weather warmed inordinately from a deep freeze, with a 70-degree swing in temperature, the attention of the media and the municipal workers turned to potholes. The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street. From the Chicago Tribune story: "Byrne said a computerized map that tracks work crews and unfilled potholes will speed the patching process and added that an estimated...

• January 12, 2009
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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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Open Government Data and the EveryBlock Project

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we're experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It's a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data. The two objectives: Get more datasets for EveryBlock so it can be a better Web site Convince governments to share that data with everyone, not just us can lead to some cognitive dissonance in the minds of government leaders. They have...

• May 1, 2008
• 4 comments

Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Buenos Aires Leads the Way Two months ago I was back in my old stomping grounds, Encinitas, California. It had been several years since I last coasted along Highway 101 as it sucks in its asphalt belly between San Elijo Lagoon and the near-perfect surf break, Cardiff Reef. I pulled off the side of the highway, rolled down my window, and inhaled the salty air tinged with the sweetness of coastal sage scrub. More than anywhere else, this was home. I still knew the names of the best surfers bobbing up and down in the Pacific as they waited for...

• April 7, 2008
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Maps That Bring Issues & Places to Life

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent seminar I helped to facilitate, health organizations and online mapping experts came together to discuss how mapping could be used to address health disparities in California and the U.S. Some current examples of useful online mapping tools in the health arena include: Healthy City: Gathers census and other locally relevant data in Los Angeles and overlays that information on maps to provide insight on health, education, and social issues. Health Map: Tracks global outbreaks and provides up-to-date information on diseases via a mapping tool Whoissick: A user-generated site that allows anyone who has the flu, etc. to...

• April 6, 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
• No comments

Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America. As part of E-Democracy.Org's Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area....

• March 19, 2008
• 1 comment

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
• No comments