Friday, January 8, 2010

EveryBlock: Notify your neighbors

EveryBlock has announced a new feature that allows users to post neighborhood announcements:
You'll now find a link to "Notify your neighbors" near the top of each place page on our site (example). Click that, and you'll get a simple form that lets you post a message to the neighborhood. Once you've posted it, we'll publish it to each nearby neighborhood, ZIP and block page so other EveryBlock users can see it. It will also go out in our e-mail alerts and RSS feeds for the appropriate geographic areas. (It'll be labeled an "announcement.") Note that you'll need a free EveryBlock account to post.

What might you use this for? It's intentionally open-ended. We've been making the feature available experimentally over the last few weeks, and people have used it for a variety of things: asking the neighborhood a question, reporting lost pets, warning neighbors of nearby crime incidents, renting out garages, pointing out upcoming rezoning projects, selling candy machines, chatting about missing mailboxes, alerting people to some water main flooding and announcing community events. One person in Chicago is using it to post things he hears on the police scanner. A councilmember in San Jose is using it for community outreach.

Use it for classifieds, use it to report local news, use it to ask questions or otherwise pass information to your neighbors...Use it for things we haven't thought of! You can think of it as a 21st century community message board.

(Eventually we might add categorization, so that you'd be able to browse classifieds vs. news reports vs. neighborhood questions, but we wanted to keep it as simple as possible to start.)
I hope we'll see these notifications in the 6th Ward's EveryBlock feed!

 If you take advantage of this, what might you use this for?

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