On a more personal level, He's a quasi-professional musician, in that He makes money playing gigs in Chicago, and posts YouTube videos from time to time. More stuff about him, including a blog, is at holovaty.com.
Knowist: Tell me a little bit about your work.
Holovaty: EveryBlock is a very, very granular local news site. We show you what's happening, literally, right around your block. That includes stuff like newspaper articles that mentioned something in your neighborhood, crime reports, restaurant inspections, Flickr photos, movie filmings and all sorts of other information, filtered by city block and updated daily. You can sign up for e-mail alerts or RSS feeds to get notified whenever things happen in your neighborhood, or you can just browse the wealth of information on our site (warning: it can be addictive!). We're based here in Chicago and cover 11 cities.
Some folks in the news industry have considered us to be the "future of news," which I think is pushing it, but that demonstrates the level of interest in our project.
Knowist: Everyblock has had a different funding path than most businesses. What are the ramifications of grants vs institutional for-profit funding?
Holovaty: I was lucky enough to get a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation thanks to a contest they held, called the Knight News Challenge. It's different from your standard VC funding in that we retain all the equity of the company but we have a specific mission to fulfill under the terms of the grant: namely, we have to open-source the code that powers our site, so that other people can take it and use it to make similar sites in their own cities. We are creating the site and code as a public service.
Knowist: Most businesses have a very clear (and legally binding) responsibility to shareholders. What's your take on that vs a responsibility to the community? To Employees?
Holovaty: First, a preface: My background is in journalism. Before EveryBlock, I worked as a Web developer at three mainstream newspapers (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Lawrence Journal-World, and the Washington Post), and I got an undergraduate degree in journalism. With that background, I've always been most comfortable serving the public, as opposed to being a cold capitalist. It sounds cheesy, but there's this feeling of a "higher calling" when you're working as a journalist -- like you're going to change the world and do public good.
So that's the context for EveryBlock. We're a journalism organization dedicated to providing a public service. Of course, it'd be nice to be able to pay our rents, buy groceries and keep the servers running, so we're now turning our attention to figuring out how to keep our project sustainable as a business. Craigslist is very much a model for us -- technically for-profit, but run like a non-profit.
Dear Knowist - I love Everyblock.com (though their crime feed lags a few days so if you want to know why 12 police cruisers were on you block yesterday you have to wait but I digress...) so why do I get Yelp reviews but not GrubHub reviews via my Everyblock feed?
Posted by: Matt Ostercamp | January 30, 2009 at 03:06 PM