
A Data Point on Every Block (Interview with Adrian Holovaty) - toffer
http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-3860.cfm
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sarosh
The post is an interesting interview with founder of a startup I'd never heard
of called EveryBlock. It's a data aggregation website for Chicago New York and
San Fransisco. It takes data from various sources and builds an interactive
map on Django and Mapnik. From a UI standpoint, the site is beautiful (crisp
and clean). The maps themselves are gorgeous (a la Edward Tufte).

[http://nyc.everyblock.com/locations/neighborhoods/schuylervi...](http://nyc.everyblock.com/locations/neighborhoods/schuylerville-
throgs-neck/map/)

Interesting quotes from the article:

"An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location-
specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of
local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site,
so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate
data and features we offer."

"If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all
that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!"
People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into
some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the
message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone
was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local
voices or not -- are in support of that core goal."

"On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going
to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some
solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a
half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that
catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all!
For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an
audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from
the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur."

~~~
pchristensen
Grant money? Now I really have to read the article to see if he explains that.

EDIT - duh, it's in the first few paragraphs. $1.1 million grant from the
Knight News Challenge

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iamelgringo
I've been following what' Adrian's doing for about a year now. He's got a
great head on his shoulder's and an all around nice guy. And, he's coming at
programming from a Journalism background. So, he has a good sense of design,
as well as a good sense of what people want.

He's one of the big reasons that I'm going with Django as opposed to Rails.

------
pchristensen
Something else interesting:

"One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code
available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?"

"The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business
decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any
area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the
open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the
open-source requirement certainly influenced us."

Source code forthcoming?

