on EveryBlock

Kudos to EveryBlock, the initiative from Holovaty and his team using geocoded civic data, news info and other information to give very localized information.

I like this. While theres not a UGC component, Holovaty has an interesting answer to this in an interview on Fimoculous:

In time, Rex. In time. :-)

If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal.

I understand and respect the idea of keeping it focused - it is what it is - but at least I'd like to see more of a commitment in collecting and inviting user-supplied data. There is a link offering to submit info:

Have you found any news nearby that we don't know about? Please submit it.

But this doesn't appear on every page (I had to go back several pages to find it again when trolling through New York neighborhoods, for example.

Not every type of Everyblock information is the kind of data Id want a cell phone alert for, but theres some that I would, so SMS alerts might be something they could look into.

I think its greatest innovation is geocoding all kinds of data and information, specifically getting geocoding on unstructured data ( regular news articles). Seems that some interesting relationships and partnerships are developing with Everyblock as more news organizations add that kind of info to their stories.

Everyblock might not need to add a UGC component itself, as other media outlets and social networks can use this info to build their own conversations and dialogues around the data, letting Everyblock continue to develop in its own trajectory. On the other hand, there's no theoretical reason why they can't develop that dialogue themselves.

Wondering why there is no public school data. Almost every single school has its own web site, sometimes rudimentary, sometimes updated or not, but they are there -- often with calendars of events, etc. Surprised thats not an element, and am curious on the reason for its exclusion.