EveryBlock was a network of hyperlocal news websites that was originally founded in 2007 with a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation as part of the Knight News Challenge.^[1] The founders included Adrian Holovaty, a well-known programmer.^[2]

The site launched in January 2008^[3] in Chicago and was acquired by MSNBC in 2009.^[2] NBC then acquired MSNBC in 2012 and shut down EveryBlock in 2013.^[4] Comcast then relaunched EveryBlock in 2014.^[5] In 2018, EveryBlock was acquired by social networking service Nextdoor and shut down, though Nextdoor kept the trademark.^[6]

EveryBlock maps plotted a mix of commercial, government and nonprofit feeds that were geotagged by location. Users could experience a blend of Flickr photos, recent crime reports, 3-1-1 calls, permit filings, local news stories and home foreclosures that could be viewed as a map, list or RSS feed.^[4][6]

The site eventually grew to provide local news for 19 cities, including San Francisco, Atlanta, New York City and Los Angeles.^[4]

While EveryBlock did not last as a standalone business, it was considered influential for its impact on the open data movement in local governments, and custom maps on top of Google Maps.

As a condition of the Knight grant, the EveryBlock source code was made open-source.^[1] Holovaty has written that Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, had emailed him to say that he learned a lot about the Django web framework, also co-created by Holovaty, from reading the EveryBlock source code.^[3]