RIP EveryBlock
With the closing of EveryBlock yesterday, both of the main reasons I started working in News Applications have disappeared from the internet. The other reason was a New York Times app called Represent, which allowed you to keep an eye on your elected representatives. The world is worse off with these pioneering news apps gone, but retiring old apps is something that our industry has to come to terms with. At ProPublica, we’ve started to retire our old apps, by removing search boxes and dynamic calls to the server. We’re making every effort to make them available on the internet forever. The process is a simple one:
wget -mkr -nH --no-parent -p --convert-links --content-disposition --adjust-extension http://url_to_app/
EveryBlock and Represent opened up doors for me: Represent got me started with GIS. The blog post about Represent’s stack is where I learned about GeoDjango and ogr2ogr, a tool I use every day. I even made my own geocoder following their lead.
Everyblock inspired me to write SimpleTiles after reading this blog post a million times, and I still use the bar charts outlined in this article for almost everything.
It is a shame that they are gone from the internet, and I hope we can replace them post haste.
4 comments
Cedric Hurst
Feb. 8, 9:59 p.m.
I’ve started a petition to MSNBC/NBC News to open source the everyblock codebase and release the user-generated content to the public domain via Creative Commons, etc.
http://change.org/petitions/msnbc-open-source-the-everyblock-codebase-content
Eric
Feb. 9, 1:38 a.m.
Code base for Everyblock is *kinda* open source already: http://openblockproject.org/
Cedric Hurst
Feb. 9, 11:59 p.m.
Eric, that’s correct, but the code is over three years old and hasn’t been updated since the NBC acquisition. We’re also looking to open up the user-generated content, which was wiped from the web with no warning whatsoever.
John
Feb. 11, 6:26 p.m.
I didn’t know about Represent. Everyblock was, unfortunately, one of those things that seemed like a good idea, but was too far ahead of its time. Even today, people don’t really think of themselves as creators, and that’s what it needs. You need to sort of scam people into generating content like social networks do.
If not, you end up with someone like NBC buying it and realizing there’s no way to reconcile corporate needs and user-generated content in a way that helps the bottom line.
Hopefully, any revival or equivalent will find some way of making itself independent in ways other than financing, too. Domain names get fouled up all the time, for example (michelinguides.com being the latest and funniest). Services close down when owners become disinterested or bought out. Server farms get seized for the crime of being in the same room as copyrighted data, as the MegaUpload story among others taught us.
What I’d like to see (and if I had the time, would try to work out) is some combination of distributed version control (like Git, Mercurial, etc.) and BitTorrent. Decentralized downloads where every copy is relatively up to date and nobody needs to know where to download the content would be a serious boon to working around these sorts of problems.
Everybody who develops or creates is going to need to start looking at contingency measures, really. The political and economic landscape gives too much encouragement to attackers of any sort, and it’s more economical for most to shut down than defend. And a way for anybody to pick up data from a defunct service and run with it would be very useful.