Ben at MagnetBox – a keen observer of information arrays and streams – reports on Everyblock.com and its new special reports about more complex geographically-related data:
We’ve launched our first EveryBlock “special report” — an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation “Operation Crooked Code.”
As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We’ve been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we’ve been building the site, we’ve come across a number of types of information that don’t exactly fit the EveryBlock mold.
We’ll interrupt this excerpt here to point out that this tool might be of particular use to groups like the Disaster Accountability Project – particularly with decentralized efforts like its Disaster Accountability Monitor and Blogger network
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For example, an architectural group named “Chicago 7 Most Endangered Buildings ” in January. That’s geographically relevant news (i.e., if you live near one of those endangered buildings, you’d likely be interested in knowing about it), but because it’s such a “one-off” type of information, we haven’t done anything with it on EveryBlock. It didn’t make much sense to add such a relatively obscure type of information to our list of news types.
Via Magnetbox.