I really like the EveryBlock site. After looking through the "Crimes" section for San Francisco, I was reminded of old community boards. The old community boards were mainly used to inform the public of town events, jobs, lost pets or stolen items. The problem with those boards were their location. If you wanted to view them, you would have to go to them. EveryBlock allows these same curious people the luxury of viewing them in their house. It also has a wider range of posts, such as crimes, restaurant inspections, zoning permit and pool inspections. It also allows a person to not only view there immediate area but communities close by as well. A potential problem is where the information is coming from. This is what the site says about its information:
"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."
Though I appreciate the information, if I really want to know the validity of the content I still need to research the sources. Yet, that is the same tactic we would need to pursue with newspapers and broadcasts. I am not sure what kind of accountability these kind of sites are held in comparison to the major media such as libel and misinformation outlets. I would like to believe with proper oversight and journalistic integrity, sites like these would be a wonderful outlet for community communications.
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I like your comparison of EveryBlock to a community board.
I suspect that spot-checking a few items would give you a good idea of how reliable these items are.
10/10
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