The
announcement today that Adrian Holovaty's
Everyblock organization has been purchased by
MSNBC.com has prompted
Alan Mutter to post on Reflections of a Newsosaur a lament.
In short, it's along the lines of: How did publishers miss the opportunity to buy it instead? And, by extension: How do they not realize MSNBC is going to come and try to eat their lunch?
Everyblock is a powerful source code that aggregates local data on crime, construction, civics and consumption, everything from restaurants to break and enters, and yields the data according to zip codes and blocks.
The good news is that the source code is open for others to use. The catch is that whatever you create you must let others use, too.
Mutter suggests Everyblock has the potential as a Cragislist-like competitor for local advertising. He wonder why newspapers didn't see this coming and construct the deal themselves.
Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock revolutionized the way hyperlocal news online worked. The aggregator of local data, produced for geographic regions as small as a city block, really astounded people when it arrived only a couple of years ago.
Now his code has been released as part of his original deal with the Knight Foundation and it's bound to offer opportunities galore to newsrooms with programming and developing savvy.
The key will be in determining how best to use aspects of the EveryBlock matrix. Simply regenerating EveryBlock won't work because markets each produce data differently and need their own treatment.
But it's a great step forward for the organizations that choose to roll up their sleeves --- indeed, it does a lot of the hard work for them. The overall impact could be significant for location-based journalsm.
The New York Times gets around to examining the hyperlocal journalism successes of such sites as Everyblock and Outside.in, and it largely finds the phenomenon positive and encouraging.
What it says the sites lack is depth and detail, but it notes that advertisers are excited by the possibilities of drilled-down local content --- even if, so far, they aren't voting with their wallets.
It's always important to view a Times piece as a turning point in public understanding on an issue, so this should make the hyperlocal sites far more popular and visible in a hurry.
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