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Is EveryBlock is going to bump into EveryProblem that BlockRocker did?

Today sees the widely covered launch of EveryBlock - a hyper-local aggregator. Coverage is characterized by words like “redefines” and “slick.”

All of which is great for the people behind Everyblock, and I wish them all the best. For what its worth though, I tried a similar concept a few years ago at BlockRocker.com. The concept was simple: find every localize-able bit of info consistently published on the web, index it, and map it. Blockrocker spat out reviews, real estate listings, pictures, events, and so on, and offered nicely customizeable RSS feeds to boot. I even had a “geotag this page” bookmarklet, tag builders for del.icio.us and blogger to encourage geotagging, and so on.

If you go past BlockRocker today, you’ll find it to be a wasteland, which hasn’t been materially updated in years. I’ve cut it down to blog posts only, and even then, only those that have been explicitly geotagged by their authors. “Why,” you ask?

Because hyperlocal has consistenlty been a technology without a market. Interests are generally not boxed by locale, and localization does not necessarily convey relevance (or traffic). This applies to news stories, photos, and so on. The second part of this rant is that generally people aren’t that interested in local data - for example, TC talks about the power of Everyblock being able to pull up a list of recently cleaned graffitti in Brooklyn. Huh. How many people are going to want to check up on that regularly? Finally: the lack of good meta-data and the overabundance of certain types of listings (events and photos were my biggest problems) meant throwing users repeatedly into a needle a haystack situation.

Anyway, I didn’t intend this to be a negative post, and I really do wish the EveryBlock team good luck. Adrian Holovaty seems well equipped to lead the site to success, and perhaps the time has come for a well-resourced hyperlocal to succeed. I suppose I’m just grumpy about my own inability to execute anything in this space.

5 Responses to “Is EveryBlock is going to bump into EveryProblem that BlockRocker did?”

Eric Eldon | January 24th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

Interesting perspective. You raise good points. I think Google Maps and Yahoo Maps have the mass of users necessary where they’ll be able to build out local data services. I don’t know how a small mapping service can grow in the way that, say, a social network does.
EveryBlock redefines the local news - - mathewingram.com/work | January 24th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

[…] Blockrocker.com, and didn’t have much luck actually turning it into a business. Why? As he says in his post at Techfold, people’s interests aren’t always aligned with their specific geographic location […]
Rod | January 24th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

Mathew and Eric - thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. Local is an interesting, frustrating space: you’d figure that everyone alive lives *somewhere* and would have an interest in that space; truthfully, however, I think neighborhood or street level aggregation is to granular, and that Craigslist has hit the right balance at the city level. Anyway, just my $0.02 - I’m looking forward to everyblock proving me wrong!
nyc.digg.com « TechFold | January 25th, 2008 at 1:46 am

[…] doing some further reading and thinking about the EveryBlock launch today, I had a thought - why not a localized digg? I initially posted this on Mathew’s EveryBlock […]
Sedm výtek vůči EveryBlocku : Online žurnalistika | February 14th, 2008 at 8:55 am

[…] ale žádný výrazný obchodní úspěch se zatím nedostavil. Jedno nehezké vysvětlení nabízí autor trochu podobné zkrachovalé služby: není […]