Another Map-Based News Aggregator

The Online Journalism Review has an interview this week with "noted journalist/programmer/Web guru Adrian Holovaty" about his new project EveryBlock, which filters local news by neighborhood and presents it in several formats, including a simple map view.

Mr. Holovaty was behind the recently ended chicagocrime.org which looked at one data stream for one city. He describes EveryBlock as an attempt to provide a full news feed for each individual block in three major cities: New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

While the graphic map-presentation aspects of this site are interesting -- Holavaty and his team created their own version of a base map, for example, instead of using Google or Yahoo -- what may be more interesting is their work on finding new sources of interesting information and new ways to extract location information where it is not already embedded.

"...we're detecting geography in narratives -- "blobs," so to speak -- and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents that refer to specific places near them."

It is also interesting to note that the project is funded under a grant from the Knight News Challenge that requires the source code to be released under an open-source license at the end of the 2-year grant period.