EveryBlock

[Matt Gillooly]

http://www.everyblock.com/

"The easiest way to keep track of what’s happening on your block, in
your neighborhood and all over your city — like restaurant inspections
in North Beach, crimes in the Loop or everything around 475 Kent Ave."

EveryBlock is a really cool mega mashup for hyper-localized news in
Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. It's lead by Adrian Holavoty,
who is also well known for building ChicagoCrime.org, one of the
original Google Maps mashups.

This is one of the best examples I know of the kind of tool that I'd
like MashableCity to enable. They've done some really neat stuff...
all the way down to rendering their own custom maps (http://
blog.everyblock.com/2008/feb/18/maps/), since apparently Google Maps
wasn't good enough for them. (No, really, I'm not being sarcastic
about this.... Google Maps really wasn't good enough for them!)

Definitely worth checking out the app as a source of ideas for what we
want to build here. Additionally, I bet that if we did the legwork to
make our Providence data very accessible to them, we could easily
convince them to make Providence one of their next cities.

[Allan T.]

I'd taken a look at this a while ago, when it was just Chicago.
EveryBlock's focus on temporal fact data - restaurant inspections,
real estate listings - jives well with Outside.in's focus on news and
conversations, though Outside.in is still operating at a zip code
level (probably because there aren't enough web conversations to power
a higher granular level of place).

Very nice interface, though I'm not sure I totally buy their logic
behind building their own maps. We should definitely have a
conversation with them on what we are trying to do, and how they've
pushed the cities they've deployed in to tip over on formatting
municipal data in a way they can use.

[Matt Gillooly]

Jon Udell wrote about EveryBlock's screen scraping approach in his
post "Overcoming Data Friction" (http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/02/20/
overcoming-data-friction/)