Noteworthy

EveryBlock is the agregation point for…

…all things local and it appears to be well done (here’s North Beach in San Francisco).   What I like is that it is a site dedicated to local content that does not require an active social network to be useful.  It’s just local, publicly available data… and lots of it.

They’ve got photos, news articles, crimes, permit info, and more.  The only piece that appears to be fairly obvious that is missing is blogging.  But then again, maybe they didn’t want to take on OutsideIn… At least not at this stage.

From a business point of view, I imagine the ad revenue opportunities are decent assuming they can get a regular crew of locals to follow their feeds on a regular basis.   I also like that the overhead on a site like this has to be pretty darn small considering it is just agregating feeds from elsewhere.

There is also a syndication play they could make.   The big guys (Realtor.com, AOL, Yahoo, etc.) are always looking for quality local content, so I would imagine there is some money to be made in being the best source of aggregated local content.

Final head’s up: At the moment, EveryBlock it is only available in Chicago, NYC and SF.

(h/t to Social Media)

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7 responses

  1. Missy Caulk Avatar
    Missy Caulk

    Dustin, interesting you know about outsideIn, since it is in Ann Arbor. I submitted my blog and it was accepted, but I can’t get any of my posts to show up. Yea, they have my feed, something about putting
    ” outside.in blog map, you’ll need to use the outside.in [where] tag with an address.”

    Now what does that mean? Does it mean every post I have to put a google map [where] ?

    Of course I have read the instructions over and over and something is not clicking. Any suggestions?

    Reply
  2. Ed Kohler Avatar
    Ed Kohler

    Dustin, I think better geocoding of blog posts would help geo-aggregation a lot. It’s tough today to determine whether someone’s writing about a lot issue, or if they just happen to be a locally product blog.

    Missy, the outside.in people are very helpful. I’d send them a note.

    Reply
  3. Dustin Avatar
    Dustin

    Missy: Ed is right that the outside.in people are very helpful and you might want to go directly there. The caveat is that I remember signing up a long, long time ago for Rain City Guide and every once in a while I notice a hit or two from the site, but I’ve never received any noticeably traffic from the site, so I wouldn’t spend to much time on it.

    Reply
  4. Dustin Avatar
    Dustin

    Ed:

    Interestingly, I’ve been geocoding all “local” Rain City Guide posts for over two years… Way back when I started, I had the idea that I would syndicate the posts to search sites (and actually had a conversation with Glenn about it)… but that was before they went out and started their own local blogs.

    The only place that we display the geo-coded version of the posts today is in our home search tool where we mix blog articles with home listings on a map. Here is one example: http://annaluther.com/Detail.aspx?mlsno=28014013 (look for the “rain drops”).

    Reply
  5. Jim Duncan Avatar
    Jim Duncan

    I too signed up at Outside.in long ago and only recently have they started updating with my blogs. I can’t remember ever getting a hit from them. That said, I still think it’s a very cool site.

    I just wish there was a way to geocode all of my posts through my editor, ecto.

    Reply
  6. Brian Columbus Avatar
    Brian Columbus

    I saw this launch yesterday. Very cool site and they’re from Chicago which makes them even cooler (HomePerks is also a Chicago company). Anyway, I’m not completely sold on all the datapoints for the Everyman audience. This might be TMI, but if its scalable in syndication it could be very useful to a broad audience. But for now, its a worthy launch.

    Reply
  7. Brad Coy Avatar
    Brad Coy

    this is very cool! thanks for the head up.

    Reply

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