Steven Clift writes a good post today at PBS.org…
While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic “user-generated” content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America.
As part of E-Democracy.Org’s Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area. This doesn’t seem very democratizing. Our goal is to connect these rural citizen media producers and bring them to workshops across the state.
Has anyone out there seen anything that combines say recent post data in Google Blog Search or Technorati and displays it as a daily/weekly/monthly “heat map” of sorts?
I’ve stumbled across a number of sites like Flickrvision and its cousin Twittervision which show real-time geo-tagged content. Panoramio shows photos from Google Earth. Placeopedia and WikiMapia are trying to get people to manually link place-based Wikipedia pages to maps. My friends with Placeblogger allow you to search by place, but I don’t want to type in village after village. The best site I’ve found that seems to get, is FindNearBy.Net which maps Craiglist and EBay sale items.
All in all, touristic rural areas do pretty well with photos online, but finding blogs/blog posts, video, wiki pages, online forums without highly focused geographic term searches seems near impossible. Can anyone help me out? Show me the map of my dreams.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.OrgP.S. We are using the Del.icio.us tag mnvoices to tag Web 2.0 drive rural/Greater Minnesota sites that we find and will be adding the best sites we find to our wiki.
Great data available from the Portland, OR police department… crime statistics by neighborhood.
I’ve looked at the crime log for my city (Burlington, VT) and, regrettably, the data isn’t presented in a way that is very useful to the interested homeowner. I assume that the data is collected to help the police do their job, more than to help inform the public.
I would find it valuable to know every time a string of cars are broken into in my neighborhood… dates, locations, details. Same with grafitti, house break-ins, vandalism, etc.
I’m sure the police have this data… it’s just not easy to get to and may be under wraps for other legitimate reasons. Sure would be nice to have the police dept. website presenting all this data with an RSS feed that popped up on my feed reader when we get an uptick in trouble… “eight car break-ins reported in your neighborhood in past two days.”
What I’m left with is our informal neighborhood watch via Front Porch Forum. That is, some people post a note on their FPF neighborhood forum when they get ripped off. This is much better than nothing, but not as comprehensive as I’d like to see.
VC Fred Wilson wrote this week about his Outside.in and Everyblock.com. The comments are interesting too. Fred wrote…
Techcrunch calls outside.in a competitor of EveryBlock. I think collaborator is more like it. It’s going to take more than one company to rebuild the local newspaper from the ground up.
Amen. Front Porch Forum is very different from either of these efforts, but plays in the same space. With 30% of our pilot city subscribing and a large percentage posting, we’re definitely well beyond just the heavy web users that dominate much of Web 2.0.
Congratulations to the Everyblock team… they just launched this new service in Chicago, New York and San Francisco…
EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city.
Powerful stuff. I might subscribe to an RSS feed of my neighborhood if I lived in a large city… but I doubt I’d visit regularly. Also I wonder if the info flow will be appropriately scaled. That is, if Everyblock delivers a phone book worth of minutia every day for one neighborhood… that’s too much. And too little info flow doesn’t work either.
Looks like they’re on to something powerful. They seem to be making good use of the free $1.1M gift given by the old newspaper money people at Knight.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more