Pretty interesting, for folks watching the intersection of media, data, journalism and community news: Everyblock is not only back in Chicago, but now in Philadelphia, too. Comcast apparently plans to expand it to Houston, Denver, Miami, Boston and Fresno. With Everyblock, it gets interesting with critical mass in Chicago, we had neighborhoods with 15,000 using - had By the last years of Everyblock, most people considered it to be a discussion board, versus a public records or data site, Everyblock co-founder Adrian Holovaty told me, in an interview this past year. Holovaty was widely cited to me as being one of the fathers of the branch of data journalism that makes data into living stories, news applications, services and products, not simply an underutilized component of investigative journalism that sits unused in a spreadsheet on a media companys internal hard drive after an article is published. towcenter.org/the-art-and-science-of-data-driven-journalism-history/ The thesis of Everyblock was not take public records and make them usable: it was what do you need to know at level of block or neighborhood, but because we were doing it and no one else, people focused on public records, he said. They focused on things that were unique versus the purpose of what the site was. Thats like focusing on Beatles because of their use of a sitar -- I love the Beatles because theyre such a great sitar band -- but its just something they used to the end of making great music. To focus there is really missing the boat.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 13:22:09 +0000