Street Fight
EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty is asked what separates his site’s mission from other major players like Patch.
Just look at the two sites, and the difference will smack you in the face.
Patch is essentially like a local newspaper website – it is heavily oriented around staff-produced articles and “static” content like business directories. It’s trying to do a lot of different things, much of it not necessarily very well.
EveryBlock is much, much more focused. You tell us which places you’re interested in following (your block, your work neighborhood, whatever), and we give you a simple timeline of what’s happened in those areas recently
At Westword.com, AOL Ventures president Jon Brod discusses Patch and other AOL properties.
Patch has been unbelievable. We’re now in over 800 communities and over nineteen states. It’s really about digitizing towns and communities. We built it from the ground up for the express purpose of a community news/information program.
We hired over 1,000 people last year, including over 800 journalists. You’re going to start to see us integrating the blogging platform of Huffington Post and commenting platform into Patch, so you’ll start to see more blogging, more aggregation, in addition to the professional journalism that is very much Patch’s main stay.
> Patch is looking to sign up 8,000 bloggers, reports Jeff Bercovici
[This update corrects the spelling of Adrian Holovaty’s name.]
