Digitial Trends has an article today about the impact Bloggers are having with Journalism specifically in the USA.
Here is a key excerpt from the article:
55% of Americans believe bloggers are important while 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role.
Good article to read.
Digital Trends has compiled a fantastic guide to Flickr. This compilation guides you through add ons available for the Flickr community.
If you are a user of Flickr this is a must read.
Here is a linkback to Joe Duck for focusing my radar on Flickr in the first place. Thanks Joe!
http://joeduck.wordpress.com/2007/01/30/fred-flickrs-frickin-fantastic/
Interesting article on CNET today about our preparedness of first responders to major catastrophes.
The real issue is communication and how to get all of the various agencies and groups working together quickly to maximize the benefit of the deployed resources and to do it quickly.
Depending on the level of catastrophe the initial response can make a difference of how long and the depth of suffering will incur to those affected.
We have seen similar issues in personal catastrophes like the James Kim story and there seems to be a strong need for a centralized communication hub that allows immediate coordination of response scaling from a local level all the way up to national and eventually globally.
Depending on the magnitude of the catastrophe there could be massive interference with our current communication infrastructure and capabilities. A robust and hardened solution is necessary and a worthwhile investment for the American public.
Another seemingly wasted resource is the army of volunteers that are eager to help out and lend assistance. Typically in the past this has been mainly recognized by the level of financial support that people have donated during and shortly after a crisis.
Today we are seeing a new type of support where people through the internet are banding together to provide ideas, clues, and actually do legwork to assist. The current search for Jim Gray is a prime example of thousands of volunteers teaming together on Amazon Mechanical Turk scanning and processing over 500,000 satellite images covering 3,500 sq miles of ocean and it was completed in 5 days!
Granted the current state of organized collaboration tools is primitive but I believe this is the beginning of a new wave of tools about to reach the Internet.
One individual I mentioned a lot is Joe Duck in Oregon who IMHO has really led a new beginning in blog communication to assist in a new way for national media grabbing search and rescues stories.
The James Kim story really took hold over at Joe's blog (http://joeduck.wordpress.com/) and literally every major figure involved in the story has commented there (over 10,000 posts so far). It could be argued whether the thread over at Joe's had any impact during the search (personally I think it did) but it surely had a major impact with the aftermath and allowed a lot of people, a place to express their opinions and brought closure to many issues that people were interested in and passionate about. Finally it has created a lot of ideas to help in future searches and it will be interesting to see what spawns from the efforts over there.
There is an article on the register today written by Lester Haines discussing how locals were enraged by comments a blogger made on his Myspace account. The blogger a manager for a chocolate company transplanted into the town to open up a new chocolate shop.
It seems the new store location was having some problems before it opened and the manager really needed to vent. He posted his unsavory comments on his Myspace blog and a local newspaper got wind of it and published his comments. The finally had to call the police because so many people were entering the store and telling the manager he should go somewhere else if he didn't like it there.
I believe this guy was really over-stressed, in his Myspace comments he stated that local vandals had smashed the front window of the new store and helped themselves to over a grand worth of chocolate. Additionally I guess he didn't like the local hotel he was staying.
The chocolate company removed him as the manager of the new location and offered free chocolate to any that stopped by their new location before December 25th. I wonder if the vandals came back to get the free stuff too? I wonder where he is working now?
The manager's comments on Myspace have been removed. To read more of the story check out the link below.
Here is the link to the original article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/22/chocolate_shop_blogger/
Joe Hunkins A.K.A. Joe Duck over at:
http://joeduck.wordpress.com/
convinced me that I needed to start to blog. Let's see where this journey takes us.
Joe has shown me the real power of the blog during the James Kim search effort in Josephine County, Oregon. Joe really deserves a lot of credit for assembling a thoughtful group of people who are now embarking on an effort trying to improve the process involving search efforts by coordinating volunteers on the internet and analyzing data. Nice job Joe!
Thanks Joe (I think!).
You should definitely check out his blog it really rocks.
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