Local community data reporting

EveryBlock has taken a very data intensive look at local news reporting. As founder Adrain Holovaty explains:

“An overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We’ve been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web.”

This generally takes the form of raw data points placed on maps. They recently rolled out a variation on the theme by using topic-specific data which adds more context to the local news reporting idea.

“A week or so ago, 15 people were arrested on bribery charges as part of a federal probe into corruption in Chicago city government. We’ve analyzed U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s complaint documents and cataloged the specific addresses mentioned within. On the project’s front page, you can view every location we found, along with a relevant excerpt from the complaint. You can sort this data in various ways, including a list and map of all the alleged bribe locations.”

This is the type of value that’s otherwise kind of missing from the experience. Rather than providing a mostly pure research tool, the site now gives some insight and perspective with an editorial view on the data. In this case, the data is telling a story that otherwise might seem a little distant to you until you see how the issue may in fact be a very real one right in your backyard, so to speak.

But it occurred to me that the community is probably even better able to capture and share this level of useful insight. It would be really neat to see EveryBlock open the reporting and mapping process so that anyone who has an interest in exposing the trends in their neighborhood or elsewhere had a platform to do so.

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Similar to the way Swivel allows you to collect data in spreadsheet form, visualize it and then share it the way Flickr and YouTube allow you to share, EveryBlock could provide an environment for individuals to do the reporting in their neighborhood that matters to them. The wider community could then benefit from the work of a few, and suddenly you have a really powerful local news vehicle.

This isn’t necessarily in contrast to the approach Outside.in has taken by aggregating shared information from around the web, but it certainly puts some structure around it in a way that may be necessary.

Managing a community is a very different problem than aggregating and presenting useful local data. But I wonder if it’s a necessary next step to get both of these fledgling but very forward-thinking local media services closer to critical mass.

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