A Data Point on Every Block (Interview with Adrian Holovaty)

The post is an interesting interview with founder of a startup I'd never heard of called EveryBlock. It's a data aggregation website for Chicago New York and San Fransisco. It takes data from various sources and builds an interactive map on Django and Mapnik. From a UI standpoint, the site is beautiful (crisp and clean). The maps themselves are gorgeous (a la Edward Tufte).<p><a href="http://nyc.everyblock.com/locations/neighborhoods/schuylerville-throgs-neck/map/" rel="nofollow">http://nyc.everyblock.com/locations/neighborhoods/schuylervi...</a><p>Interesting quotes from the article:<p>"An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location-specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site, so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate data and features we offer."<p>"If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal."<p>"On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all! For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur."

I've been following what' Adrian's doing for about a year now. He's got a great head on his shoulder's and an all around nice guy. And, he's coming at programming from a Journalism background. So, he has a good sense of design, as well as a good sense of what people want.<p>He's one of the big reasons that I'm going with Django as opposed to Rails.

Something else interesting:<p>"One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?"<p>"The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us."<p>Source code forthcoming?