Courtesy of Red Herring
The Red Herring Technology website has an article about the public use of blogs and other mobile technology to submit and disperse information after the disaster.
“The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami” blog had 10 contributors (from Mumbai to New Jersey), 12,109 page views, and 29 posts - mainly information from disaster relief crews - within 12 hours of being set up on Monday. Wikipedia’s “Tsunami” entry quickly incorporated this newest example, and a comprehensive entry titled “2004 Indian Ocean earthquake” sprang up as a collaborative historical record of the event. By Monday, Google News had more than 3,000 international news stories clumped into a tsunami-coverage list.
On Sunday, the day of the disaster, 13 of the top 40 links picked up by BlogPulse addressed the “tidal wave disaster,” reported Intelliseek’s Sue MacDonald. “Up to that point, I hadn’t seen any blogs from that part of that world up, but when places like Instapundit linked to their blogs, we caught that,” she said.
In particular it indicates that in the future these sort of technologies may help warn people of impending natural disasters and prevent deaths, rather than just reporting after the fact.
Information wave - Today’s real-time disaster relief may be tomorrow’s real-time rescue effort.