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.

nyc.digg.com

After 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 thread, but wanted to capture it here too. So - why not nyc.digg.com, boston.digg.com, or sf.digg.com?

There’s not a lot of thought behind the idea, this just popped into my head. So tell me why it won’t work below.

digg, everyblock, hyperlocal localization

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.

blockrocker everyblock