EveryBlock: data about your neighborhood

Adrian Holovaty leads the team that has created a new website called Everyblock. The site, which is relatively new and only has information available for 15 cities, pulls information from a variety of sources and creates a kind of activity stream for specific neighborhoods within these cities. Everyblock is designed to keep track of everything that is going on in your neighborhood, from local news stories to civic information like building permits, restaurant inspections and even changes in liqueur licenses, as well as activity from social networking site like photos of the neighborhood that have shown up on Flickr, Craigslist postings, and user reviews of local businesses.
Site construction on EveryBlock began in 2007, with the launch of its first 3 cities in early 2008. Since then, it has continued to expand the number of cities it covers and EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC this past August. Designed to tell users what is happening in their own neighborhood, each city block has its own news feed that lists information that applies to its location. It does not show information about the city in general. For example, a feed on the Hollywood neighborhood in LA will contain information specific to that area but will not contain information about LA in general, even if it has implications for the neighborhood in Hollywood. They also do not put in directory type information about an area so you won't find information about who lives down the street from you. The site also offers email alerts and RSS feeds so users don't have to visit the site to know what is going on in their area.
The combination of different sources (news, civic and social) was at first a bit surprising. While it seems a bit less far-fetched after having looked at the site, I still can't help but wonder if anyone would use EveryBlock for anything other than entertainment purposes. Do people really want to know every time someone takes a picture of the local flower shop or every time the restaurant down the street is inspected? I don't actually know. But this particular combination of data from different sources is something I haven't seen before and I've certainly never thought about all the different types of data generated about a particular area as being something that could (or should) be combined. If nothing else, EveryBlock helps users to visualize the incredible amount of data generated about a particular location and offers a way to make that data easier to access.