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Another “21st-century disaster tip”: using Qik in an emergency
By WDavidStephenson | August 26, 2008
As you know by now, I luv Twitter’s ability to share location-based, real-time information in a disaster,
I’ll be adding a YouTube version as soon as my buddy Jason Daniels of Medfield TV has edited it!
As I said in the streaming video, Qik’s a relatively new application, and only works with a limited number of videophones (mainly Nokias) at this point. However, given the adoption curve for other Web 2.0 devices and apps (remember when Twitter was a nice cozy little neighborhood about this time last year, before the get-rich-spammers got clued in?), I suspect that within the next year:
- Qik will work with the majority of new phones
- using Qik becomes so ubiquitous that people will naturally use it in disasters, as has happened with Twitter and Flickr, and family, friends and neighbors will automatically look to it for information.
Equally important, people will remember to give their emergency Qiks titles, descriptions and tags that will make it easy to search and aggregate them (ya gotta love them folksonomies!) - (hopefully) police and fire authorities will begin to give tips on what kind of visual information would be most helpful to them in emergencies
- (again, hopefully) police and fire will automatically look to Qik in disasters for situational awareness from people who, as (bad) luck would have it, happened to be the first on the scene.
OK, I’ve talked about a number of other apps in the past as being THE killer app for “networked homeland security,” ad hoc emergency communications, then something new always comes along to supercede it.
But for now, you’ve gotta admit Qik opens a whole new arena of empowering the public to be full partners in emergency response!
If your phone works with it, I urge you to start getting familiar with Qik, so you’ll be able to use it effortlessly if disaster strikes.
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