OpenBlock Blog

This Thursday and Friday, we’ll be demoing OpenBlock at the 2011 Investigative Reporters & Editors Conference in Orlando, FL.

On Friday from 2:15-3:15 PM, we’ll be doing a demo and talking about the project in Oceans Ballroom 01. Here’s the schedule.

Otherwise we’ll be at our table in the exhibitors hall:
http://www.ire.org/training/conference/IRE11/exhibitors.html
Come say hello to project manager Frank Hebbert and programmer Paul Winkler!

(Unfortunately we won’t be there Saturday, so be sure to look for us on Thurs-Fri!)

On May 12, I attended the GeoWorldSummit in Brooklyn. Some quick impressions:

It was a bit of a bust as far as OpenBlock-related networking; I didn’t meet anybody during the pre-talks shmoozing, and unfortunately wasn’t able to stay for the 8 PM reception. Somebody was there from the OGC and I would’ve said hi but I never found them.

Most of the panels were about locally-targeted advertising.

The most interesting panel for me was the hyperlocal panel - interesting, but too short.

Some points that stuck with me:

• Advertising revenue success/failure stories:
  • Gothamist, Baristanet and other grass-roots local sites are making money (from advertising) - earning a living for a small staff.
  • Everyblock? and Outside.in are, according to the panelists, not making advertising money because they just don’t have enough users.
  • Patch is the big question mark. AOL is sinking another $40 million into it. Will they succeed? This “landscape is littered” with failed attempts by giants to get local.
  • The usual mistake after failing with paid content is to fail harder with unpaid content. Will Patch do that? “Only Huffington Post has succeeded” with unpaid content.
• “Local doesn’t scale” - by definition.
• Patch compared to WalMart:
  • It’s good that Patch is making an online presence for some communities that had nothing before. Unlike WalMart, when Patch sets up in a smaller city/county/whatever, there’s typically nothing for them to supplant - no “mom-and-pop” online community sites.
  • It’s bad that Patch is moving WalMart-style into communities that already do have significant online resources — fragmenting the audience, “stealing” local reporters, etc.
• Local and Location Based are not the same thing. For example, an app that finds the nearest Starbucks is location-based but not local, because that’s generic information. A “what’s happening near me” app that suggests going to a local music club is both location-based and local, because that club exists nowhere else.

What does all this imply for OpenBlock? Nothing clear. We still think it will be a useful platform for those “mom-and-pop” community sites - independent, or at local papers, etc - to enhance their local offerings. Unlike patch, everyblock, and outside.in, we’re not trying to provide a hosted service for everybody - we’re trying to provide a useful tool for existing or new local news outlets. So we have a different set of problems.

I’ll be at the GeoWorldSummit today, hoping to interest people in OpenBlock and network with other people working on hyperlocal projects.

It’s a bit hard to find the address on the event’s web page. More than a bit. It’s at 155 Water St, Brooklyn, NY. 

I’ll be wearing a gray OpenPlans T-shirt.

- Paul Winkler

On Thursday 3/17/2011, from 4-7pm CST, Paul will be demoing OpenBlock at the Knight News Innovation Lab’s “News Technology Fair”.

It’s being held at Northwestern University’s McCormick Tribune Center in Evanston, IL.

Also present will be representatives of several other Knight-funded projects, including DocumentCloud.

If you’re anywhere near Evanston, come by!

We recently integrated - and launched on the demo site - a new theme for OpenBlock designed by Phillip Ashlock. Thanks Phil!

It’s still a bit rough around the edges - there are some pages that still need attention. But I think you’ll agree that this is a big improvement already.

You might also notice that the base map tiles are now using Google Maps. This was because we were demoing OpenBlock at the IRE CAR conference and the OSM-derived base layer we’d been using was having server trouble, and it turned out to be quicker to swap in a Google base layer than to fix the server.  This is something I’d always wanted to make configurable anyway, and it turned out to be easy.  (Still need to wire it in to the admin UI though.)

Just for fun, here’s a trip through the past. When the EveryBlock code was first released, if you started it up with some data you’d see something like this:

Then, just to have something to work with, our coworker Andy did a stopgap design that looked like this (and ran on our demo site until a few days ago):

And now we’ve got the new theme:

It looks a lot nicer now. (We’re using a Woo theme.)

And I’ve started a FAQ.