EveryBlock is a local news site. It looks to be an aggregator of sorts, and the site filters news based on locations (and even neighborhoods).
In their own words -
EveryBlock is a new experiment in online journalism, offering a news feed for every city block in 15 cities. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to you. To our knowledge, it’s the most granular approach to local news ever attempted.
They currently cover a few cities in the US, and hence will not be of much use or interest to the Indian. *However*, what is interesting is that they have open-sourced their code for people to use and build their own news sites. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site’s backend code to be open-sourced. The Code is available at http://www.everyblock.com/code/ .
To make the source code easier and useful, they have packaged it into different modules. Those of you who have been looking for a Django-Python based wiki and blog; please look no further!
Also, we would like to know your thoughts on the following -
- Which and Why is better – News Aggregators? Or News Sites?
- Will making source code public benefit an organization/company in any way?
Would love to hear what you have to say!
The codebase is one dependency hell and let’s not forget the UI templates look and feel are not part of codebase/GPL. So even after installing Mapnik and all other dependencies user will have some coding to do.
[quote] So even after installing Mapnik and all other dependencies user will have some coding to do. [/quote]
While I haven’t downloaded and installed the code base to verify the complexity, the coding part shouldn’t be a hindrance.
Their FAQ section says :
This means anybody — news organizations, governments or independent citizens — will be able to create sites that work like EveryBlock, given the technical expertise.
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There you go. *given the technical expertise*. It’s said.
@ Aggregator Vs sites.
It depends. If one looks for quality and general content, one would prefer to go for fewer sites which has consistently given good quality unbiased content instead of aggregator.
@sansdom
Agreed! But, what do you prefer?
I would prefer Reader (Aggregator) since my interests are no way connected to quality content
News aggregators by definition aggregate news related to a particular subject or interest.
News sites are more general and not focused.
Right now news sites are ruling but aggregators are putting them on the block. That is the reason why blogs have seen such a huge success.
Verdict is give me news aggregators any time.
[quote] News aggregators by definition aggregate news related to a particular subject or interest. [/quote]
Not necessarily so. Aggregators try and group news/stories from various sources together and make these available. Google News (http://news.google.com/) is a good example.
Blogs are (in a way) a kind of news sites themselves. People post news and views which is fresh and makes for good discussion points (like how we are doing here).
Ok! So we have 2 votes for news aggregators; and none for news sites.
Doesn’t anyone like IBNLive? Or BBC?
Thanks Neha.