Adrian Holovaty Retires chicagocrime.org

Adrian Holovaty announced on his blog recently that he would be shutting down chicagocrime.org. Adrian's new venture Everyblock supercedes the functionality of chicagocrimes by providing a variety of city/neighborhood oriented data sets for cities.

It's with mixed feelings that I announce the end of one of my projects, chicagocrime.org. This site has been serving Chicago residents since May 2005. I hope you'll indulge me in a brief retrospective.

Chicagocrime.org was one of the original map mashups, combining crime data from the Chicago Police Department with Google Maps. It offered a page and RSS feed for every city block in Chicago and a multitude of ways to browse crime data - by type, by location type (e.g., sidewalk or apartment), by ZIP code, by street/address, by date, and even by an arbitrary route. The New York Times Magazine featured it in its 2005 "Year in Ideas" issue, and it won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism.

Chicagocrime was a mashup before the term "mashup" was even in the popular lexicon. One positive about the "demise" of the site is that it is going to be featured in a museum:

This story has a fitting epilogue. In just a few weeks after chicagocrime.org goes offline, the site will be featured in an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, called Design and the Elastic Mind. Chicagocrime.org will have ended its life and become a museum piece.

How many other web frameworks have ties to museum exhibits?! Adrian is a pioneer in the industry and I wish him the best with the Everyblock venture.

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