Looking toward EveryBlock’s future -from holovaty.com
“…we’ve reached an interesting point in our project’s growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we’re open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That’s a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock’s philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?
We have a number of ideas for sustaining our project beyond a dependency on grants, like building a local advertising engine and/or selling hosted versions of the open-source software, but we’re sure there are other ways for EveryBlock to be a successful business. That brings me to the reason I’m posting this — we’re looking for ideas and partners who would be interested in helping us figure this out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, get in touch with me. I’m confident we’ll make something happen; it’s just a matter of how.”
How do I think EveryBlock can become economically sustainable?
1. Gannett or Advance Publications buys the services of the entire EveryBlock team to incorporate EveryBlock into their news sites. Most importantly the team is tasked with creating logical, simple, cheap ad placement on news sites. The Code remains open source.
2. Go the Firefox route and partner with Google to make their search the default search on EveryBlock. Make millions a year, remain open source.
3. Partner with Apple to to have Everyblock preloaded onto every iPhone and iPod. This frees Apple up from using popular Google apps like Maps and Yahoo apps like Local. This make even more money when partnered with the applestore.
4. Go the WordPress route and offer consulting and other services.
5. If anyone knows how to make money online it is Amazon.com. Maybe they can use EveryBlock for geo-tagging their products and services.
6. Make Weichert or some other huge realtor the default real estate search for EveryBlock.
7. Offer EveryBlock and EveryBlog (currently taken by drupal) franchises to locals looking to get into publishing.
Lastly, I just want to mention that in its current iteration, Everyblock is extremely impersonal and that adding or partnering with content producers like blogs or news sites could add real value via increased community participation.
I’m sure there are others. Share your ideas!
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