Last winter, Adrian Holovaty launched EveryBlock, a Web site that aggregates news and public records by location, allowing visitors to punch in their addresses and see a list of newspaper articles, crime reports, building permits and restaurant reviews connected to their blocks, neighborhoods, wards or ZIP codes.
Yesterday, EveryBlock rolled out a new tool that arranges these stories and records into a variety of timelines and trends reports, giving readers “an overview of the number of news items of the particular type, by day, over the last few weeks,” Adrian says on his EveryBlock blog. “You can click a day to view the full list for that day. The same timeline is available for each type of information, so you can see timelines of crimes, building permits, restaurant inspections, photos, etc. Can you spot any trends in your neighborhood?”
Some of the possible trend breakdowns you’ll be able to see now: “Top restaurant violation types in a given neighborhood; top building permit types within a certain block radius; most common years of mortgage for foreclosures in a certain area. It’s a wealth of location-specific information,” Adrian writes.
Last February, Adrian visited the Yo office to discuss the launch of EveryBlock: