Holovaty's Everyblock

Adrian Holovaty speaks to OJR about Everyblock:

OJR: What's EveryBlock providing that the average Web reader could not get before?

Holovaty: First, fundamentally, we offer a way to browse news at the block level, with a news page for every block -- hence the name EveryBlock. We've done a fair amount of due diligence and are pretty confident this hasn't been done before -- and in three of the densest cities in America, at that.

Second, we're providing some information that didn't previously exist online. Two examples are film locations in Chicago and restaurant inspections in San Francisco. The former is provided to us by the Chicago Film Office, and the latter is provided to us by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, which has its own website but doesn't include some of the data we publish.

Third, we make it easy to browse information that already existed online but was buried in deep government sites, either in "deep Web" search forms or non-Web-friendly formats such as PDFs. Two examples are landmark building permits in New York City and crime reports in New York City, but there are many other examples across our three city sites. This has been an interest of mine for a number of years, and it's a dream come true to have the opportunity to do it at this scale.

Fourth, we're detecting geography in narratives -- "blobs," so to speak -- and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents that refer to specific places near them. Some examples are New York City news articles, San Francisco zoning agenda items and Chicago city press releases. Another (geeky) way to phrase this is that we're harvesting geographic metadata from unstructured text.

Fifth, we're providing some light trending and aggregate reports for *each* type of information on our site. For example, see the Chicago crime data.

OJR: What has kept, or is still keeping, newspapers from having functionality like EveryBlock's on their websites?

Holovaty: Unfortunately, there's a lot. In the general case (and "general" means this excludes the newspapers out there who are doing great things online) --

* A lack of technical competence
* A culture so obsessed with daily deadlines that little thought/resources are put into paradigm changes
* A culture that disdains technology and science, particularly math, and, worse, actually takes pride in that
* Red tape
* Legacy systems
* Legacy attitudes
* People who ask "Is this journalism?" ;-)

MORE.