Everyblock Interviewed

Adrian Holovaty, the creator of the local news aggregator Everyblock (which I blogged about here) has a great interview up on Fimoculous.com. It deals extensively with the technical side of the site, but also includes an interesting philosphical discussion of what the site does and doesn't currently provide. On user-generated content, Holovaty makes a good point:

If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal.