Adrian Holovaty

Everyblock - Five EveryBlock lessons

“When I was your age we had to reverse engineer Google’s obfuscated JavaScript just to get maps on our pages!”

Mentioning Chicago crime maps, how we had to do things before the API was available.

Coolest and most useful part was every block in Chicago had it’s own page, listing all the crimes on the block. This made me think we should be able to do the same thing but bring in all sorts of other stuff that’s related, literally just for that block.

2 year grant from the Knight Foundation.

Chicago and NYC, expanding..

Can see every crime, business licenses, building permits, all this stuff is news to you if you live on the block.

Zoning changes, if a restaurant wants to build a bar, that’s very relevant to you. Filming locations. We also geocode news stories. Reviews, flickr photos, all sorts.

1st Lesson - “What is refreshing about Everyblock is that they’re feeding me existing data in an interesting way instead of asking me to give them my data”

Taking advantage of existing data, rather than the usual “give us your data” stuff.

“Be nice and appeal to civil servants”

Don’t bash people even if you’re improving their crappy site.

“Governments should focus on services [not on data]”

They shouldn’t have to concentrate on the cool site for viewing the data, they should just make sure they can provide the service for you to enter data.

“Plot cities/agencies against each other”

If one city is giving you good data, tell other cities.

2nd Lesson “The more local you get, the more effort it takes”

Slides shows “Convenient centralized USA building permits database” - on a clipart PC screen. Unfortunately there is no nice central database.

Lesson 3 - “Embrace hypertext”

Showing a blurred crime mashup, can restrict to show just certain crimes, certain dates. Not “webby” because you can’t link to results.

“Will my site work without maps?” - Chicago crime did because it had good text.

“Permalinkability”

Lesson 4 - “Move beyond points”

Not every story has to do with a point, some have to do with a neighbourhood. Don’t do a crappy job by choosing a centerpoint. Showing highlighting areas using polygons, or a part of a road using a line.

Can restrict zoom levels if necessary

Lesson 5 - “Roll your own maps”

Look at what Google give you for instance, they put building outlines, subway stops, one way arrows. Do you specifically need that for your mashup? You have no control with google maps over the colour of water, the colour of streets, the size of streets, language, etc. etc.

“One size fits all”

Would you seriously go to your web designer and say “yeah for our corporate website, use some standard wordpress template”

At every block we use mapnik to generate tiles allowing us to use our own styles, our own colour of blue. We use tile cache, openlayers and django.

No building outlines, no one way streets, basic style matches everyblock’s design.

‘Search for “take control of your maps”’ to see an article by Paul Smith from every block about how to do this.

Questions

Q: How are you going about managing relevance for users, allowing them to specify what they’re interested in?

A: They can say what schemas they’re interested in, to select don’t show me restaurants, only show me crimes. Can’t go further into schemas but we’re looking to add it.

Q: …. question concerned about privacy issues, a crime in a house

A: We only geocode to block level to partially help that. Also the cops have a limit on what they give out in some cases, for super sensitive stuff they don’t provide it. We mention this on the site. We don’t provide any names, e.g. for buyer/seller information on properties.

Q: … talk about the experience of parsing locations out of text

A: Kind of a big cludge, thinking that we solve things by throwing different methods at it rather than it being perfect natural language processing. Every time we find a new way of specifying an address that we haven’t handled before, we add it.

Q: Can you give us an idea of why mapnik for instance, rather than mapserver?

A: Would have to defer to Paul Smith, guessing it was about python bindings. Font rendering too.

Q: How many cities and how do you make money?

A: Funded by grants for 2 years, don’t know after that. Grant, VC, magically dream up business model? All the code will be open source. Not an incorporated company, just a bunch of guys in chicago. Not telling how many cities.

Q: Is there enough awareness of the project that cities are coming to you offering to help?

A: Yes in some cases, news organisations are asking how to format articles, bloggers too

Q: How do you get boundaries?

A: We get it from the government. Easier in the US, can be harder in other places, costs a lot in Germany for instance.

Where 2.0: EveryBlock: A News Feed for your Block

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