Another Hyperlocal News Site

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.”