« Remote, self-powered sensor networks a win-win solution | Home | et al.: you can go overboard on hive mind… »
Those quakes aren’t just shakin’ earth, but also communications
By WDavidStephenson | May 15, 2008
Hi. Breaking long radio silence (it’s because I’m working on a longer piece about neat research at U of Colo. by Leysia Palen that substantiates my “networked homeland security” approach, and on a white paper for Don Tapscott’s Gov. 2.0 project on my data visualization obsession..) because two recent earthquakes have driven home how critical texting in general, and specifically Twitter (and to think that it was just about this time last year that I was puzzling whether Twitter’s “what I’m doing right now” emphasis could possibly be used substantively! ‘Nuf said!) can be in providing real-time, location-based situational awareness about natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and Bad Things in General:
- my main man John Solomon blogged about Melissa Block’s story from China about how the people there communicated primarily via text messages regarding that killer quake. He cited my frequent rants on this issue. Thanks, buddy.
- in many ways, I found it even more interesting that Twitterers were the first to confirm the baby (2.0) quake that hit Northern Virginia last week. Obviously, the China quake was so cataclysmic that everyone was instantly aware of it, but, according to new friend Dave Witzel, because the smaller quake was centered 3 mi. west of Annandale, not downtown, it was Twitterers who happened to be in the area who were the first to broadcast the news, and their dispersal across the region helped pinpointing where it was (hmmm, do we need a new term for locating a disaster: Twitterangulation???)
BOTTOM LINE: Brian Humphrey of the LA Fire Department got it loooong before most officials about Twitter’s value in emergencies: he and his associates do tweets on every call. If you’re an emergency communications manager, you owe it to yourself to start monitoring local tweets (probably through Hashtags.org) and to follow Brian’s lead by establishing your own Twitter feed, so that local folks will know to send you direct messages the next time things go to hell in a handbasket.
BTW: I’m rather proud of that first sentence. Rather Faulknerian, I’d say. If I could just stretch it to 1,288 words, I’d wrest the longest sentence crown away from his “Absalom, Absalom!”
Technorati tags: homeland security antiterrorism e-gov e-government 2.0 e-government crowd-sourcing wisdom of crowds crowdsourcing smart mobs swarm intelligence emergent behavior networked homeland security LA Fire Department Brian Humphrey cell phone cellphone texting SMS location-based services geo-spatial web web 2.0 homeland security 2.0 disaster management 2.0 disaster management Twitter disaster planning disaster planning 2.0 China earthquake
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: empowering public, technology, policy and politics, collaboration, e-gov transformation, networked security | |
