Rex Sorgatz interviews Adrian Holovaty about Everyblock,

Rex Sorgatz interviews Adrian Holovaty about Everyblock, a site that “aggregates piles of local information, like restaurant reviews and crime stats, which are then displayed block-by-block”.

On a completely different note, it’s been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we’ve run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn’t make it any less of a challenge.

I believe that Everyblock will be most successful not through the utility of its site but if it can get more civic and federal agencies to release more structured data about what’s going on in our cities and country. It is *our data* after all.

• Adrian Holovaty
• cities
• everyblock
• interviews
• Rex Sorgatz

Adrian Holovaty, who works at the Washington

Adrian Holovaty, who works at the Washington Post, has some advice for how the news media should function: “newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview”. Holovaty argues for more structured data to be offered, not just the typical written story. Matt Thompson previously argued that the press needs a new paradigm, a shift from searching for hidden information (a la Watergate) to interpreting the massive amounts of publicly available data for patterns and stories (a la Enron/WorldCom/etc).

• Adrian Holovaty
• journalism
• robinsloan