TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

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.

Boooo to Amazon - Suing Statsaholic: Amazon API/ECS Boycott time?

EDIT: HOW ABOUT MONDAY, APRIL 23rd FOR AN API ECS BOYCOTT? Post your thoughts in the comments. By “boycott” I mean if you use ECS to link to Amazon for affiliate sales, shut ‘er down and hit amazon in the wallet.

As a frequent user of the Amazon ECS API and follower of Amazon’s forays into platform-territory (S3, etc), I find it very disappointing to read about Amazon suing Statsaholic [Alexaholic] [via Mashable].

Mashable has the actual filing in their post, but the nub of it is that Statsaholic took Amazon’s open data and application platform and added value to it by offering an expanded feature set around Amazon’s offering, much like I did with the Flickr API and Google Maps on BlockRocker.com [flickr portion since removed], and much like many mashup artists have done thousands of times all over the net. I identified a gap in Flickr’s product offering and filled it, using their API. Flickr benefited, and so did I. When Flickr released their own geotagging product, I let the photo portion of BlockRocker die a slow death, eventually shuttered it, and that was that.

The same thing should have happened with Amazon and Statsaholic. Why Amazon feels the need to sue a niche business out of existence rather than thanking them for the adoption they’ve driven to this point and clobbering them with a superior product is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the Amazon Mashup community should unite in solidarity against bullying of API-partners by having an Amazon shutdown day: I imagine if everyone using the Amazon API shuttered it for a day in protest, Amazon would feel some impact. I’ll Amazon links on UpcomingDiscs.com and HDDB.net - anyone else? What’s a good date?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, blockrocker, boycott, flickr, mashable statsaholic