Blogs and the Hurricane
Blogs and the Hurricane
by Ephraim Gadsby
I was listening to National Public Radio going into work the other day and I heard a story about how Blogs were and continue to be, so useful to those affected by Hurricane Katrina. More news comes out everyday in the media about how Blogs are helping the victims of Katrina in ways beyond what the traditional media can do. Traditional media, of necessity, must focus upon the big picture of almost any news story. I must say at this point, I am very thankful for the great work performed by the media with the Hurricane coverage and the coverage of price gouging for gasoline and the slow response of government. If it were not for the Media, I dread to think how many lives would be lost due to inaction and slowness on the part of government to respond. The Media keeps up the pressure and produces results. It makes the government accountable to its employers, the cit! izens, and in Bush’s case (his subjects).
To see examples of how Blogs, the new “Citizen Media”, is directly helping victims and victim’s families, visit a few of the hundreds of Blogs that have been set up for the aftermath of Katrina.
http://neworleansrefugees.blogspot.com – This site connects loved ones who have been separated.
http://www.bloggersblog.com/hurricanekatrina – This site links you to all of the various Blogs that are covering special interests from missing persons to pets, to individual neighborhood news.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor – This is a really cool blog that provides an almost real time account of the misery in New Orleans from an IT guy at work in his office building in New Orleans.
Blogs allow citizens to report on news at their very local level to help each other out in ways that the government and traditional media just do not have the resources to deal with. These Blogs also help those institutions learn better about the realities of what is going on in almost a real time fashion.
So How can you help?
Blogs are created by ‘citizen reporters’ to address areas of special interests to those citizens. The communications backbone for Blogs is the Internet. The backbone for the mainstream media is the Radio and TV air waves, cable lines and news print. All of these forms of communication are converging and all to the benefit of the citizen. Even when the New Orleans news paper could not publish its daily print, it was publishing to its web site which remains up. Television and radio stations are able to do the same. What can I say… The Internet is absolutely fabulous and it is the media for ALL people.
So how can you help? Start blogging. If you are reading this “Blog” then you are half way there. While thankfully, I have not been directly affected by the Hurricane (other than paying too much for petrol), I do have my own special interests and those are in the LIMS community. I have posted this Blog to a new site called www.limsblog.com. This is the citizens forum for posting news, thoughts and meanderings related to the LIMS industry. There are literally thousands of other such Blogs on the Internet that are the forums for citizen reporters to those special interest areas.
Old technology such as mail lists and usenet are rapidly being replaced by the richer media of Blogs. These old internet standards are now made useless by Spam but blogs are web based and far less prone to Spam thus giving readers and writers a greater degree of protection against spammers.
Blogs are rapidly becoming source material for the traditional media. For instance, www.limsfinder.com (where I write articles occassionally) is a site built upon Blog software and it has become an Internet media source for all things related to not only LIMS but Laboratory Informatics in general. Much of their source material will come from Blogs that are posted to by you.
When you see the power of Blogs as they relate to a disaster, just think of their power as a media for things like LIMS.
So get out there and start Blogging!
