The latest one is
EveryBlock, which launched a "find the news near me" site for New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Behind the project are a Knight News Challenge grant and Adrian Holovaty, maker of ChicagoCrime.com, the first mashup built on Google Maps.
I tested out Chicago, since I know that city best. News types include restaurant inspections (news?), crime (news?), lost and found (news?), missed connections.... The thinnest in the ZIP I queried (60637, Hyde Park) was "News articles." So, there's room for improvement content-wise. The about page notes only three specific sources: Yelp, Craigslist (missed connections), and Flickr (images). The categorization is nice - you can view searched news on a map, by category or by date. You search spatially with an address, ZIP Code or neighborhood.
The maps are very pretty - with just a simple +/- to zoom and "slippiness" - you can pan around by dragging the mouse. No indication of the tech behind it nor the data sources, but a comment suggested the tech is homegrown. The neighborhood data seems to be, too: "The names and boundaries on EveryBlock come from official government sources, with some additions and tweaks we've made on our own." The site is already dealing with "the neighborhood boundaries are wrong" issues. Holovaty is on it, suggesting on the
EveryBlock blog that users may in time be able to "specify which neighborhood best defines a given address."
Thanks for the writeup. Our list of sources goes way beyond Flickr, Yelp and Craigslist -- see chicago.everyblock.com/news/ for a full list of our Chicago sources, for example.
Adrian @ EveryBlock
1) they've defined "news" very broadly -- building permits are included with incidents of cleaned graffiti with traditional media articles with ... the list goes on. I haven't seen any other "hyperlocal" aggregation website provide this type of detail; and
2) they've highlighted for me several local government data sources that otherwise would've been buried on a government agency's website.
Though it doesn't offer any trend or pattern analysis, the site is data-rich and I'm sure it will be helpful to local residents, the media, neighborhood activists, etc. We've had a similar experience with the OASIS site in New York (www.oasisnyc.net) - people find new uses for the site's property-specific information all the time.
Thanks - a more direct link to news articles by source for Chicago: http://chicago.everyblock.com/news-articles/by-source/
Can you say anything about the mapping technology? That's what we are interested in here!
Adena
Thanks. How would regular people figure out that it's OpenLayers/TileCache? Is there some clue?
Adena
As far as figuring out that it was TileCache: if you right click on a map tile, and 'view image' in a new tab, it'll say "TileCache.py" in the URL.
And lastly, for mapnik: That one is just a 'You recognize the rendering quirks that Mapnik has'. For example: http://tinyurl.com/2sybub is a tile that to me shouts 'Mapnik' quite clearly; but you'd need to have used the software a fair amount before you'd know that.
Note that if you were to view source on a number of OpenLayers-using sites, you wouldn't be able to tell that the site is using OpenLayers; the source code itself does not always tell you enough to be able to make the determination. Mapbuilder is one example of this; the OpenLayers code itself is loaded later, not via tag, so you wouldn't see much evidence of OpenLayers.
Also, I personally don't consider 'view source' something a 'user' would do