A few weeks ago I contacted and had lunch with Adrian Holovaty. He is well known in tech circles as the developer of chicagocrime.org and now as the guy behind Everyblock. Adrian and his team are doing some great work at Everyblock and it was great to meet him and understand how he sees the project today and in the future.
I am still trying to get my head around the ways in which Everyblock could evolve. But even now, at its very early stages, it's a very interesting project. I subscribed to the RSS feed for my block here in Chicago and I now look forward to checking it every couple of days to see reviews for local restaurants, crime reports and all sorts of other things happening nearby. And, in addition to this destination/personal usage scenario, I see Everyblock as becoming a platform that:
1) Surfaces/aggregates/disseminates local data at different granularities (city->neighborhood->block)
2) In the process of 1), makes previously unavailable and/or unstructured public data available in a structured manner
As such, it could become very valuable as an underlying layer to both news-focused services and social-focused services (for more on this social surfacing/aggregating/disseminating, see my previous post).
Finally, check out this interview of Adrian by John Udell (of Microsoft). It's interesting and worth listening to. I just came across it and it reminded me to finally write this post on Everyblock.
Adrian and team are doing a great job and I look forward to seeing how Everyblock keeps on developing.
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