Everyblock, the data-driven hyper-local news website covering 16 US cities, announced today that it has added continuing education listings from the website TeachStreet to its newsfeed. Now you can learn when there are new cooking or violin classes in your neighborhood, side-by-side with news of police activity, restaurant reviews and news stories about your area.
I love Everyblock and haven’t paid enough attention to TeachStreet before, it looks good too. MSNBC owns Everyblock and it’s an invaluable service, but each time a new data source gets added, a fundamental flaw in the user interface rears its head again. None the less, this is an exciting dataset to see added to the hyper-local news.
It’s too hard to exclude particular types of updates from your newsfeed. There ought to be a way to say “show me restaurant reviews, media reports, TeachStreet listings and police activities, but not fire alarms or traffic stops.”
I really believe that increased granularity would greatly increase the frequency with which I and many other people visited Everyblock. The prospect of surfacing continuing education courses in my neighborhood is quite exciting.
