Everyblock and a future of mapped classified ads

Anyone interested in the future of classifieds should keep an eye on Everyblock.com, a new company founded by journalism-geek extraordinaire Adrian Holovaty. The company’s work in adding all manner of information to online maps is particularly relevant to classifieds, though we’ll have to wait a while before the open-source system they’re working on will be available for use in classifieds applications.

Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock.com open-source project will be ready for you to use in mid 2009

Everyblock was founded last year by Holovaty, who left his job as Washingtonpost.com’s online innovation guru when he received a $1.1 million grant from the Knight News Challenge to start the new company. Knight admired his work, especially the pioneering ChicagoCrime.org (launched in 2005), which took crime reports for the city of Chicago that were public records and displayed them on Google Maps and in innovative presentation formats. For the first time, Chicagoans could get a simple visual look at crime activity near their homes or workplaces, and click down to find details about crimes that occurred.

Flush with all that Knight money, Holovaty and his small team are working on taking what was pioneered in Chicago and applying it to other forms of public documents and data. Everyblock currently has sites serving Chicago plus New York and San Francisco.

The team, based in Chicago, is applying their concept to a growing array of data, from restaurant inspections, to building permits, to lost-and-found postings, to news articles, to photos, and more. As an example of the utility of this information being presented in Everyblock form, think about how useful it could be before heading out to eat in San Francisco to check for restaurant inspection results in the area near your hotel or home.

When asked about the utility of mapping classifieds, Holovaty says that absolutely that’s a great use for Everyblock’s system. You can easily imagine the Everyblock concept applied to garage sale ads, lost-and-found listings, or real estate listings, for example. Mapping could be useful for other classified categories, too, but of course there are privacy issues to consider. (A private classified advertiser selling his car or bicycle might not want his ad showing where he lives, but since there’s a benefit to exposing that information, he should be given the option.)

Example of Everyblock.com’s data mapping interface: mixture of mapped data in a Brooklyn, NY, neighborhood

You’ll just have to wait

I wish I could announce that Everyblock’s system was available for use by media companies to start experimenting, but that won’t come until June 2009, when the company’s Knight grant money runs out. At that point, according to Holovaty, Everyblock will contribute its code and documentation to the public as open source. Anyone (not just media companies, of course) will be able to download the code and work with it to create their own applications.

The likely outcome is that once it’s released, publishers will find all sorts of uses for the system and create new local services similar to Everyblock’s pilot city projects. Other developers may create and release open-source modules, such as for classifieds.

Holovaty says that some companies have approached him, hoping to start deploying the system now and commercializing it. But he says that goes against the spirit of the grant, and at this point he is not interested in much beyond continuing development to make Everyblock the best it can be when the open-source code is released.

He describes what the company is doing as “altruistic, really.” (Holovaty has some of the same characteristics as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who famously has resisted turning his company’s huge traffic and usage into monetary success, turning down offers that would make him a multimillionaire.).

Holovaty is sanguine about what will happen to Everyblock after the grant money is gone. He’ll consider turning the company into a vendor serving publishers; he might make Everyblock an end-user network of sites; or he might discover that it’s not such a great idea and move on to something else.

In addition to keeping us guessing on that, he’s also cagey about plans for additional Everyblock sites, saying only that more cities will get Everyblock sites, but not which ones or how many.

Got geo-tags?

In terms of how to leverage web data mapping with classifieds, publishers would be well advised to start thinking about this now. Holovaty and company don’t really consider classifieds to be part of their “M.O.,” he says, preferring to focus their efforts on public and news-oriented data. But he is interested and says that it’s possible that Everyblock will work with mapping some existing classifieds data if there’s time before the Knight money runs out.

What advice he will give to publishers looking for classifieds solutions is to start geo-tagging ads (and every other bit of content coming from a media publisher). Adding location data to real estate listings and garage sales are obvious places to start, but a better approach is to do it with everything. For instance, auto ads from car dealers can be geo-tagged, so that car buyers could more easily see inventory of nearby dealers from a simple map interface. Employment listings could benefit from map locations to make it easier for job seekers to find opportunities within easy commute range and get directions for job interviews.

Of course, geo-tagging is just part of crafting a proper overall content-tagging strategy for your ads, Holovaty suggests. Future systems will allow consumers to find all ads (from many different media sources) by location plus ad content. That is, tomorrow’s consumer will, for example, type in her home address, the brand of used car she’s looking for, plus features and price range, and get back mapped results. (Newspaper classifieds need to be in that mix, which is why geo-tagging ads is so important.) Of course, some individual classifieds websites already do this — by letting you find relevant listings with a specified number of miles from your home zip code — but the difference that’s coming is that consumers will be able to search using a map interface through classifieds from many different online sources.

News companies already are starting to be smarter about how they tag content, Holovaty says. But more of them need to step up to the plate.

Geo-tagging classifieds also fits in with a “distributed web” strategy, which is becoming increasingly important for publishers. Classified ads that are properly geo-tagged will be picked up by other services online and reach a wider audience — thus better serving the advertisers.

For those not wanting to wait for June 2009 and Everyblock’s open-source code to be released, there are alternatives worth exploring. Companies like Yourstreet.com and Outside.in have built content-mapping websites that currently focus on hyperlocal news, which presents news and other types of content in a map view. Both of those companies are seeking partnerships with local media companies, though neither has yet tackled classifieds.

We’re still at the beginning of all this. Companies like Everyblock, Yourstreet.com, and Outside.in are pioneering a new and powerful way to present relevant data to consumers. Classifieds are an ideal fit for this type of technology. The time to start thinking and planning is now.

Tags: adrian holovaty, everyblock, maps