It's up on Github: <a href="http://github.com/brosner/everyblock_code/tree/master" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/brosner/everyblock_code/tree/master</a>
Truly amazing - giving away the source code!<p>This will encourage many others, using this system, to start local micro-news channels in their own communities. Instead of the local newspaper/TV channel owning the regional media turf, this could enable discussion culture in a more democratic way. The question is... aside from hackers: who is ready for this? I remember the cartoon from Gaping Void - "the future belongs to the geeks, nobody else wants it" - <a href="http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003301.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003301.html</a>
Not everyday that you get to see the last 2 years of internal works of the minds of 3 commiters on a major open source web framework. There's some crazy and amazing code in there. Going to take a good while to extract all of the awesome out, but it is bound to be one of the bigger contributions to open source in quite some time.
I wonder beyond just city names, what extra data is needed to get an implementation running. What map data is required, how about GPS data? What is the geographic taxonomy... suburbs, zones? I'd like to get something running, but want to have the code as comprehensively implemented as possible.
Unfortunately, the HTML and CSS that makes EveryBlock so useful is not included in this release.<p>I'm not sure why the Knight Foundation didn't insist that these components be part of the release, unless the designers were paid out of a separate budget.<p>I understand that releasing these components would have led to clones of the site, but I think, to a certain extent, that is one of the goals of the project.