EveryBlock: Why Hard Civic News TRUMPS Web 2.0 Anonymous ‘Fun’
Adrian Holovaty was granted $1,100,000 by the “Knight News Challenge” to “release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.”
The EveryBlock “project” which opened for “business” yesterday, however, is not content to do its unique civic duty. Instead, Holovaty also takes the typical Web 2.0, easy user generated content redistribution tack, diluting the hard, real local news that drives the real workings of real urban centers’ citizens everday with the same old personal musings of a minority of Internet users, anonymous ones.
Holovay knows that the real value he brings to the local table online is what is unique to EveryBlock, aka “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 we’ve forged relationships with governments to make it available.
Flickr, Craigslist and Yelp, however are NOT buried, are NOT hard to find, and are already on the Web, ALL over the Web in some cases: Yelp redistributes, free of charge, its anonymous babble about food to any takers.
Holovaty calls the tack on snippets of non-representative, anonymous Web posters “fun from across the Web.” EveryBlock’s value proposition, however, is NOT Web 2.0 UGC “entertainment.”
EveryBlock ought to be about what it is uniquely supposed to be: Real world “civics” real goings on, undiluted.
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