Chicago crime upgrade

Chicago crime is no more -- chicagocrime.org that is.

On Friday, Adrian Holovaty, a programmer/journalist who created the Web site, announced on his blog (holovaty.com) the site is being taken down because of an outdated server.

The site, created in 2005, was a combination of Google maps and Chicago police data. It allowed residents to interactively search crimes in their neighborhoods and surrounding areas.

Instead of upgrading the server, Holovaty wrote that all pages will be redirected this his latest project, EveryBlock, a new generation of chicagocrime.org.

Holovaty wrote:

I've often described [EveryBlock] to people as "chicagocrime.org on steroids — more than just crime, and more than just Chicago." It's brought to you by the same people (Wilson and me from chicagocrime.org, plus Paul and Dan, who've worked on similar projects), and it has the same philosophies. As we developed EveryBlock, we kept chicagocrime.org firmly in our minds — this new thing we were making had to be a superset, an expansion, a significant step forward. So there's almost nothing you could do on the old chicagocrime.org that you can't do on EveryBlock. And, unlike chicagocrime.org, which was always a side project, EveryBlock has a team of four people improving it full-time, meaning we have the resources to add features, such as e-mail alerts (just added yesterday), that chicagocrime.org never had. We hope EveryBlock is a worthy successor.

Currently EveryBlock serves three cities -- Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

I learned about Holovaty through journalism class and find him quite innovative.

Holovaty is known through the journalism world as a pioneer. He is one of the earliest journalist/programmers and works for Washingtonpost.com.

Chicagocrime.org won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism.

For more information about Holovaty, check out this interview from the Online Journalism Review.