Contests: Everyblock comes to your block

June 11, 2009

Everyblock comes to your block

I've been meaning for a couple days to welcome our friends at Everyblock to town. Everyblock is a Knight Foundation-supported site that delivers a wealth of targeted local data (think crime reports, restaurant health scores, nearby news, home sales, etc.) to the neighborhood level.

The service is led by our pal Adrian Holovaty, the paterfamilias of Django, the programming framework we primarily use; and designed by Wilson Miner, who did our original TexasGigs design (which morphed into the current PegNews design) and held our hands through our early days before we had our own dev team.

To answer the obvious question: No, they're not competitors, except in the sense that all 80 gazillion local info sites out there are in a collaborative, competitive space race to figure out how to deliver the most useful info. Their site isn't delivering original or curated content; isn't as focused on community or events; and for the time being isn't selling local advertising here. They are tackling some hard problems with crime data and restaurant scores that we've poked at -- and we're more likely to seek their help with that down the road than to replicate.

Anyway, we've been rooting for them to come to Dallas ever since they launched. Glad y'all are here.

Travis Bush, verified:

Maybe this is a small workaround for having to pay for data collected by the city and the state?

4 years ago
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ch0, anonymous:

Cool, I've actually been waiting for their arrival as well... the Pegasus/TGigs association is neat too.

4 years ago
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Mike Orren, verified:

Travis, it's not a matter of paying for data in these cases, but the much more difficult problem of parsing it into something useful -- and the even more difficult problem of doing so across multiple jurisdictions. In the end, some of their work will be open-sourced and hopefully, we'll be able to partner up down the road...

4 years ago
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Travis Bush, verified:

Mike..I was just thinking about the article that talked about having to pay for some city or state records. Maybe EveryBlock can provide some of that same kind of info to you and the general public. Just a thought.

4 years ago
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Mike Orren, verified:

Yeah-- I get ya' Travis. Different records in this case...

4 years ago
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Travis Bush, verified:

BTW..check yer syntax in the title...:D

4 years ago
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ch0, anonymous:

My enthusiasm is now checked by the fact that they only stick to Dallas zipcodes... oh well, we are nothing if not patient. These sorts of stats are easily retrieveable for free online from your local municipality if you know where to look.

Kinda fun that we're still in the infancy the self-aware Arphid Cloud... one day we will all look back and laugh, just one moment prior to rending our garments and running into the woods babbling about spiders...

4 years ago
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Mike Orren, verified:

cho, I think I know why they stuck to Dallas zips. Same reason we've not implemented some things like crime reports and restaurant scores. Local government is a Tower of Babel. No two jurisdictions report in the same format. It is extremely difficult to take feeds from, say, Dallas and Mesquite and Arlington and make them compatible in any kind of database that makes sense. I'd almost say it is impossible to do so without cooperation from the government agencies involved, something they are generally suspicious about giving, if not downright obstructionist.

Take the campaign contributions database we used to do -- The only way to do it was to hand enter the bulk of the data, which we got by mail and fax from the gummint.

That's part of why Everyblock's work is so important. Crack that problem and there's a wave of not only available, but accessible public info.

4 years ago
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ch0, anonymous:

Ye gads, I understand. What a mess to parse and sort! I guess NWO is a ways off yet... wonder how HuffPost is all up in my contribution business though.

One day Mike, one day!

4 years ago
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jefmelch, anonymous:

I don't suppose they'd want to do Texas Education Agency AEIS / TAKS /Standard Reports (superintendent salary, school disciplinary incident, staff/student ratios) by campus attendence zone?

It'd be HARD to match a user location to an attendence zone to a campus -- but it would be really cool.

4 years ago
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Jeremy Dunck, verified:

jefmelch, I actually did look into that. At the time, greatschools.net was pretty poor, and I looked into the TEA data along with attendance zones.

Unfortunately, I found many problems with the TEA data-- things like a reported low turnover rate in teachers but also a very low seniority. There were enough statistical fallacies that I couldn't have much faith in the reported numbers. It seems to me that people must not be using the TEA data for anything of consequence-- publishing it as required by law, but little auditing of obvious flaws in the reportage.

That along with the total lack of classroom-level statistics made it very difficult to make the TEA information useful to an individual parent or family.

Also, attendance seems to be determined in different ways for different ISDs-- in some cases, there is no geographic rule at all, but simple round-robin allocation of applicants to schools.

Finally, greatschools.net improved quite a bit before I could spend the time to go from proof-of-concept to production on the project, so all in all, we abandoned the project.

If EveryBlock can pull off useful DFW school information, my hat's off to them.

4 years ago
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