hoodline-logo

I hadn’t seen Hoodline before; here’s their about page description:

We want to be the go-to source for news about the places where you live, work and play.

Restaurant openings, housing developments, retail news and more — whatever’s happening in your neighborhood, we’ll get the scoop and keep you in the loop. The same goes for crime, transportation issues, and the lowdown on the woman walking her duck around the Haight. We’re curious about all of it. And we’re pretty sure you are, too.

They recently released a version to embed into other websites (see here for TechCrunch article), dubbed a neighborhood kit. (I just added them to the list of neighborhood data sources I published last month).

There have been many in this realm. Outside.in, Everyblock, Blockfeed (coverage), BlockAvenue / CoEverywhere, etc.

None of those have stood the test of time.

Hoodline is described as a web scraping company. I honestly can’t imagine how a scraping approach for this will work long term. The web has too much noise already, it doesn’t need yet another service reposting a big segment of it in a slightly different way (especially if that content is re-posted to hundreds of others sites via APIs/widgets).

My question: why isn’t this something local brokerages (or teams) are owning in a big way? A curated approach, at a hyper local level, is exactly the sort of differentiated community play brokers/agents/teams should be making.

If you’re not building something unique, why are you bothering? (see here and here with some more thoughts on how StreetAdvisor fits in this world)