EveryBlock – Muni info now as iPhone app

Daniella April 29, 2009 Tech 1 Comment

Tags: computational journalism, craigslist, EveryBlock, hyperlocal, iphone, localism, mashup, Media, PickupPal, public information, rss reader, smart mobs, yelp

EveryBlock is “a news feed for your block,” a mashup of municipal public information and maps. It keeps track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city. At the moment, EveryBlock is covering 11 American cities: Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami-Dade, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, DC.

So why is this useful? Every day, loads of new information is created about the place where you live: people inspect restaurants, newspapers cover accidents, and people post photographs. Not only is this information spread out on many sites, but no one would have enough time to sort through it themselves.

EveryBlock has three main types of news:

Civic information — building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections and more. In many cases, this information is already on the Web but is buried in hard-to-find government databases. In other cases, this information has never been posted online, and EveryBlock has established relationships with governments to make it available.
News articles and blog entries — major newspapers, community weeklies, TV and radio news stations, local specialty publications and local blogs. EveryBlock classifies articles by geography, so you can easily find the mainstream media coverage near particular locations.
Fun from across the Web — local photos posted to the Flickr, user reviews of local businesses on Yelp, lost and found postings from Craigslist and more. EveryBlock figures out the relevant places and points you to location-specific items you might not have known about.

The best part is that you can get this information instantly – fed to your RSS reader,email alerts, Twitter via @everyblock, or iPhone via iTunes.

Like SeeClickFix and PickupPal that we reviewed earlier, EveryBlock is using the internet to democratize information and make it easily accessible and digestible for a wider audience. We’re fans of that! (via Smart Mobs)