I've written before about a website that opened up this year called EveryBlock; it basically takes in just a wealth of raw feed-style data from a variety of online sources in five particular cities (things like crime rolls, newspaper articles, new building permits, coming film shoots, customer reviews of pubs and restaurants, and a lot more), then interprets this information and spits it back out in an intelligent way. It means, for example, that you can simply type in your zip code there to get all the latest information from just your neighborhood, and even subscribe to an RSS feed of the info with one click. (And for disclosure's sake, let me mention again that I'm personal friends with a number of the people who started EveryBlock, including Daniel X O'Neil and Adrian Holovaty, although have nothing to do with the site myself.)

Well, turns out the group has some good news to share this week; they've recently partnered with the Chicago Tribune, to be specific, to present a new special page at the website, which tracks every article the Trib has posted in the last 48 hours and then plots them on a city map. It's basically the best of both worlds, which is why I'm so impressed; the Trib gets this extremely cool way to present their content, without having to hire any cutting-edge programmers or maintain the system themselves, while EveryBlock gets the massive new publicity that comes from this new partnership.

Anyway, it's an extremely cool little gadget, and I encourage everyone to stop by and check it out when they get the chance. By the way, this is not an exclusive partnership; being the semi-community service EveryBlock is, they also offer to put such a thing together for other news services and other blogs in the cities they cover. You can stop by their blog for more.