EveryBlock

» see everyblock.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

everyblock only made sense if you had an american street address. it was built to tell you what was happening on your block, the police call two doors down, the permit filed across the street, and my block was in ankara. it was never going to serve me. i read about it the way you read about a well-made tool for a country you do not live in.

adrian holovaty was the reason to pay attention. he was a programmer with a real name in web circles, part of the django framework, and he built everyblock in 2007 on a knight foundation grant. the idea was to take all the public data a city quietly produces, crime reports and inspection results, and pin it to a map at the block level so local news could be as granular as your own street.

it launched in chicago in early 2008 and spread to nineteen cities. msnbc bought it in 2009, which looked like security. it was not. when nbc absorbed msnbc it inherited everyblock, and on february 7, 2013 it closed the site the same day it announced it, effective immediately. holovaty wrote afterward that he had no warning, that the last he heard nbc was optimistic. hyperlocal news had a business-model problem nobody solved, and a big owner decided it was overhead.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

everyblock was one of the smartest versions of an idea a lot of people were chasing in the late 2000s: that the internet could finally cover the street you actually lived on. it did not write articles. it collected the machine-readable exhaust of city government and made it legible. for a few years it was the reference point everyone in hyperlocal pointed at, the one that worked technically even when the money never showed up.

~ what replaced it ~

the code had a second life, holovaty open-sourced parts of it and a version came back for a while under community hands, but the original was gone. what everyblock proved was mostly a negative: that you could build hyperlocal news well and still not make it pay. the lesson outlived the site. from ankara it was always someone else's neighborhood on the map, but the shape of the problem was universal, and nobody has really cracked it since.

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