I think the last time I checked it was six months ago, when Adrian left and I was curious to how the site actually looked. To my surprise, the site seemed to have thrived in appearance...the navigation had been cleaned up, more data sources had been added, and users were participating in discussions.
I signed up as a user but didn't stay around...I think the site failed to become a "sticky" place. There was not enough of the psychological reward in returning to the site/refreshing the hoomepage...the site seemed content with just delivering a raw stream of datapoints rather than filtering out key stories and weighting their importance (which is another argument for how successful Facebook has been with their Top Stories feed, even though people think they just want items in chronological order).
EveryBlock seemed very lackluster in its promotion. If I wasn't in the online news business and had been aware of the Knight News challenge, Adrian's early journalism work, or of Django, I don't think I would've ever heard of EveryBlock.
Their Twitter account had fewer than 4,000 followers, which seems incomprehensibly low for an online community news site 5-years-old. Reddit has a thriving community of city-based subreddits...there's no reason why EveryBlock's rich information shouldn't have been a staple on them, but it was hardly ever linked to:
I wish I could offer some link examples of the things I thought EveryBlock did well, but apparently its owners see no value in its long tail archival traffic and have effectively blanked out the site.
EB may have suffered from a lack of discoverability of its best features.
The feature I found most useful was the ability to define an area on a map, then get email updates when other users posted news in that area. I think that should have been the primary focus of Everyblock instead of the raw stream of data.
I signed up as a user but didn't stay around...I think the site failed to become a "sticky" place. There was not enough of the psychological reward in returning to the site/refreshing the hoomepage...the site seemed content with just delivering a raw stream of datapoints rather than filtering out key stories and weighting their importance (which is another argument for how successful Facebook has been with their Top Stories feed, even though people think they just want items in chronological order).
EveryBlock seemed very lackluster in its promotion. If I wasn't in the online news business and had been aware of the Knight News challenge, Adrian's early journalism work, or of Django, I don't think I would've ever heard of EveryBlock.
Their Twitter account had fewer than 4,000 followers, which seems incomprehensibly low for an online community news site 5-years-old. Reddit has a thriving community of city-based subreddits...there's no reason why EveryBlock's rich information shouldn't have been a staple on them, but it was hardly ever linked to:
http://www.reddit.com/domain/everyblock.com/
I wish I could offer some link examples of the things I thought EveryBlock did well, but apparently its owners see no value in its long tail archival traffic and have effectively blanked out the site.