Address-based News Site “EveryBlock”

The Internet made the Earth “flat”, as Thomas Friedman maintained in his 2005 book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. If a New Yorker makes a phone call to order pizza, an operator at the pizza company’s Mumbai call center answers it through the fiber-optic cables that connect the two cities across the Pacific. The Internet shortened the distance between the two of the biggest economies, the US and India, into a click away, totally reforming the international supply chains. This is why Friedman described the highly globalized 21st century world as “flat”.

On the other hand, another trend totally different from globalization has been clearly witnessed since the Internet began to connect people across the world - hyper-localization or cyber-balkanization. While flattening the world, the Internet have also developed further people’s interest in their own city, town and even street and preference to get along with a small, like-minded group. As a response to this trend, hyper-local media informing readers of what is happening in their next doors flourished.

A new form of hyper-local news website, EveryBlock, has recently been launched in three US cities, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with a motto of “a news feed for your block”. EveryBlock is a kind of news search engine through which you can find local stories and information by address, postcode or neighborhood. The engine has algorithms developed to filter locations within free-form texts. If you type an address in the site’s search box, all information including photos and videos related to that location appears on screen.

I put Manhattan in the Search New York box on 25 January to test the process. Three photos uploaded on that day by Flickr users around Lenox Hill, Roosevelt Island and 25 business reviews including West Side Market and Nokia Theater Times Square were returned in addition to a long list of news items. If you click an item, the information is provided on a new window with a map of its location. On top of the screen appeared a list of nearby addresses such as Upper West Side, Yorkville, Queens and Precinct 19. News articles, blog entries, images and local authority information collected by the site can also be browsed by news topics.

The founder, Adrian Holovaty, is a journalist and Web developer who has worked for washingtonpost.com and developed in 2005 one of the original Google Maps mashups, chicagocrime.org. He could begin this EveryBlock project by winning $1.1 million in last year's Knight News Challenge competition. He said in an interview with Poynteronline: "We're interested in spreading the concept of 'geocoding' news - that is, classifying news articles by location. Currently, we do that by crawling news sites and applying algorithms and human editing efforts, but it'd be best for everybody if news organizations did this on their own."