EveryBlock is a new experiment in journalism, offering a Web "newspaper" for every city block in Chicago, New York and San Francisco — with more cities to come. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to you. To our knowledge, it’s the most granular approach to local news ever attempted.

We want to answer the question "What’s happening in my neighborhood?"

In dense, bustling cities, the number of daily media reports, government proceedings and local Internet conversations is staggering. Every day, a wealth of local information is created — officials inspect restaurants, journalists cover fires and Web users post photographs — but who has time to sort through all of that?

Our mission at EveryBlock is to solve that problem. We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas.

We point our readers to three broad categories of local news:

• Civic information — building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections and more. In many cases, this information is already on the Web but is buried in hard-to-find government databases. In other cases, this information has never been posted online, and we’ve forged relationships with governments to make it available.
• News articles and blog entries — major newspapers, community weeklies, TV and radio news stations, local specialty publications and local blogs. We do the work of classifying articles by geography, so you can easily find the mainstream media coverage near particular locations.
• Fun from across the Web — local photos posted to the Flickr photo-sharing site, user reviews of local businesses on Yelp, lost and found postings from Craigslist and more. We figure out the relevant places and point you to location-specific items you might not have known about.

All of this information is presented in an easy-to-use interface. There’s no need to register; feel free to search for any address anonymously.

To view the complete, current list of information we publish, click "Browse news by type" at the top of any EveryBlock page. Here are direct links: Chicago, New York, San Francisco. Note that each city has different data sets, so it’s worth exploring each list to see the full scope of our project.

• We focus on news, as opposed to static data. On EveryBlock, you’ll find a list of recent restaurant inspections near you, but you won’t find a list of the train stations or schools near you. We’re a news site, not a city directory. Roughly speaking, we’re interested in local data that has a date and a specific location.
• Our policy is to avoid publishing data that identifies addresses of people, for privacy reasons. Hence, we don’t publish sex offender data, or divorce records, etc. The exception to this policy is mainstream news articles; if a newspaper publishes a person’s address, our system will detect the address in the article and link to it.

Each type of information we publish on EveryBlock comes from a specific source, with a specific method. We obtain some data by parsing government Web sites and crawling the Web; in other cases, governments send us data that isn’t available online.

In each case, we document where we get the information and how often it’s updated. To find out more about any data type on EveryBlock, visit the "Browse news by type" page (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) and click "More info..." next to the data type you’re interested in.

Our goal is to make a site that offers interesting, useful, timely and relevant news to any person who lives or works in the cities we cover.

EveryBlock was created by a Chicago-based team of four with a strong background in Web development, journalism and government data. You can read more about us on our about page.

We began working in July 2007 and launched January 23, 2008, with sites for Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

Over time, we’ll be expanding to other cities, adding data sources to our existing city sites and adding features to all sites.

In June 2009, when our grant period is over, we’ll be releasing our site’s source code free to the public, under an open-source license. More on this in a subsequent FAQ answer.

We have limited resources and have to consider several factors when deciding which cities to cover, such as:

• Data availability / openness of government
• Population density
• Local interest in our project

If you’re interested in helping us launch EveryBlock in your city, please consider these factors and send us an e-mail to tell us about some local data sources you’ve identified, or other reasons why it would make sense for EveryBlock to launch in your part of the world.

We wouldn’t rule it out. The main limitations and deciding factors are outlined in the answer to the previous question.

Our project is made possible by a generous two-year grant from the Knight News Challenge, an annual contest held by the Knight Foundation. With this grant, the Knight Foundation has three primary goals:

• To benefit specific communities by funding the creation and maintenance of the everyblock.com site for those communities
• To promote experimentation in the news industry
• To help news organizations, governments and communities by funding the creation of open-source code that anybody can use to create a similar site

Our source code will be released at the end of our grant period, in June 2009.

This means anybody — news organizations, governments or independent citizens — will be able to create sites that work like EveryBlock, given the technical expertise.

Aha! You’ve asked a question to which we haven’t yet found an answer.

Although we are fully funded by a grant, we are open to experimenting with useful, nonintrusive advertisements. Please get in touch with us if you’re interested.

We are indeed interested in partnering with existing media outlets in the cities we cover. Please get in touch with us if you’re interested.

Visit the EveryBlock blog to read about the latest features and data sets we've added to our site. We're a small, fast-moving team, and we make improvements on a weekly, even daily, basis. The blog has an RSS feed, too, if you're into that.

If you don't have time to visit your EveryBlock page on a regular basis, you can sign up for our e-mail alerts or RSS feeds, which we offer for every block, neighborhood and ZIP code in each EveryBlock city. This means you can get a custom-tailored daily e-mail for your block, containing the latest news we've found around you.

To sign up for e-mail alerts for a given geographic area, go to the appropriate block/neighborhood page (example) and click "E-mail updates" in the upper right. Registration is free, and e-mails are sent daily.

Similarly, to access our block- and neighborhood-specific RSS feeds, click the "RSS" link next to the "E-mail updates" link. If you're not sure what RSS is, visit the What is RSS? site.

Our site uses a stack of open-source software: PostgreSQL, PostGIS and Django. We’re lucky enough to use the Python programming language.

For our servers, we’re happy clients of Media Temple.

Rather than using a third-party map provider, such as Google Maps, we've designed our own maps to fit better with our design and our custom data-visualization needs. (Here's a map example.)

Behind the scenes, we're using the free, open-source tools Mapnik, OpenLayers and TileCache.