In between shuffling around boxes full of stuff at the new place, I’ve been pondering a bit of a post reacting to some of the critiques of EveryBlock, particularly those that claim that a weakness of the site is that it provides information without context.
Turns out I don’t have to write that post, because Matt Waite has pointed out what has been obvious to me from the start:
I’ve seen several people say that EveryBlock is data without context, but that’s not entirely true. The context comes from the user through geography. The block is the context. The value you put into that context is based entirely on the fact that you live there. And, from that powerful context, the user provides further context by choosing what’s next, what is interesting to them.
Exactly.
As journalists, we tend to equate context with the inverted pyramid. (Okay, I realize that’s overly broad, but you get the point.) Data isn’t news, we’re taught, until we give it form and relate it to the reader. That idea misses the point: EveryBlock data comes with context built in and builds on the knowledge I already have of my neighbourhod, and what aspects of neighbourhood life matter most to me.
Matt has plenty more to say about EveryBlock which is well worth reading. I agree with most of it, but not necessarily with this:
… I don’t think newspapers need to fear this. Study it? Emulate parts of it? Learn from it? Absolutely. Fear it? No. Even if EveryBlock becomes crazy popular — and I think it will — it points to your content. If anything, EveryBlock will help people get to your content that interests them.
He’s right that EveryBlock points back. What I think newspapers have to fear is that when an EveryBlock-like site springs up in the local community, it carries with it huge potential for the most targeted local advertising you can imagine. If you can access “news” data in a multitude of ways from a database, why not advertising data? Study, learn and emulate is a pretty good idea here for most newspaper execs, it seems to me.
TAGS: EVERYBLOCK, HYPERLOCAL, DATA
