links for 2008-01-14

• Chinese Blogger Beaten To Death By Government Officials
  (tags: china blogger freespeech)
• William Gibson - Official Website
  (tags: williamgibson)
• In Disasters, Everyone, Not Just Bloggers, Should Use Twitter on Threat Level
  (tags: twitter crisis)
• Africa: Citizen Journalism Opening Up Political Space
  (tags: africa CitizenJournalism)
• Ogilvy China Digital Watch
  Blog on all things digital in China
  (tags: china digital internet future)
• Adrian Monck - what's gone wrong with Al Jazeera English?
  (tags: amonck aljazeera news)
• Dubai Media Observer
  Media BLog from UAE
  (tags: dubai blog media arabic)

Comments

[Mark Kraft]

This isn't entirely new, in that it's not much different than what I was doing after Katrina hit New Orleans, to stay in touch with people trapped inside the city. I actually tracked those who stayed behind the night before, encouraged them to evacuate if possible, and, if not, to set up text posting / email posting / phone posting via LJ. What's different, I guess, is the Red Cross' involvement with the program, which is a nice plus for centralizing info and sending it back to those effected automatically.

That said, although I think it could be a useful solution, I personally don't think it's a good solution. Ideally, some sort of emergency service should be built in to the phones at the network level, rather than encouraging anyone to sign up for some kind of service.

[Mark Kraft]

Another issue with the idea of using Twitter as a way of handling post-disaster information... I just visited the Red Cross Channel on Twitter to get more a feel for it, and its stats are as follows:

Following 0
Followers 164
Favorites 0
Updates 37

Those stats are hardly those you would want of some kind of centralized solution, or even for a centralized kludge, and thus far in its lifespan, the content on the page would've bene pretty useless for disaster survivors.

Maybe I don't "get it", or understand the full ramifications, but to me, this project seems tiny and somewhat dead in the water. It is a kludge -- a workaround -- for a real solution that hasn't been created yet.

The whole idea that digital phone networks go down after disasters seems like a real oversight in design, rather than a problem with how people use their phones. Similar problems are solved every day with broadband, through packet limiting... so why can't similar solutions be created for emergencies on mobile phone networks?

According to wikipedia, in Japan, mobile phone companies provide immediate notification of earthquakes and other natural disasters to their customers free of charge, and even provide earthquake early warning alerts. An interactive menu accessible through the phone's Internet browser notifies the company if the user is safe or in distress, allowing disaster response crews to locate people in distress from their phone signals.

... and the U.S. gets a Twitter network you have to sign up for, with 164 people using it?! Shameful.