So first, an important disclosure: that I am a personal friend of both Daniel X. O'Neil and Adrian Holovaty, two of the founders of the new hyperlocal aggregation site EveryBlock.com, which just opened this week and is currently available for the cities of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. That said, however, I'm a big, big fan of what the sites do; basically an expanded version of Holovaty's award-winning ChicagoCrime.org, EveryBlock is constantly in the process of gathering both citizen-based and governmental public data about each of these cities, logging the info not only by address but neighborhood, zip code, political ward, police precinct and more.

Basically, this then lets you as a citizen of one of these cities simply show up to the site and type in your neighborhood or other criteria, to get all of this information tidily gathered up and presented in a nice organized way; I did it this morning, for example, for my own Chicago neighborhood of Uptown/Buena Park, and got not only a list of news items that have happened in my neighborhood in the last 24 hours, not only a list of all neighborhood crimes that have been reported (including a daring shoplifting at the convenience store around the corner from my apartment), but also photos at Flickr from my neighborhood that have been posted recently, reviews of neighborhood businesses that have recently been posted online, even a couple of "Missed Connections" ads from Craigslist that took place at various pubs in my neighborhood. And that's not even the end of all the information theoretically available; according to the main menu at the site, depending on what's happening in your own neighborhood, EveryBlock will also deliver info on any location film shooting going on, liquor-license applications, recent restaurant inspections and more. And if this wasn't enough, there are even RSS feeds associated with every search, so that you can simply subscribe and not have to worry about constantly revisiting for the latest.

It's a smart, minimalist, info-rich site that I highly recommend to those who live in the participating cities, an example of what exact great things can happen when you combine a wealth of public information, a smart electronic sorting system, and a sharp Web 2.0ey interface. I highly suggest that you stop by and check it out yourself.