I awoke at 7am EST on Black Sunday and heard on NPR the news of an 8.9 earthquake in Indonesia. The words “forty foot wave” struck me much the way “767” had on 9/11. I had just returned from spending two weeks living on a Pacific beach in Oaxaca, Mexico and know people who often travel to Phuket Thailand.
In the early hours there was very little information in the “mainstream press” so I went to the blogs to try and learn the extent of the tsunamis effect. I first went to Feedster, they were down for maintenance, then I went to Technorati and a search for Phuket brought back a listing of hotels and travel sites. Next I tried tsunami and got back thousands of hits but most were from “mainstream media” RSS feeds with the very same information I had already received from NPR.
There were blogs, hundreds of blogs, but everyone I clicked on was nothing more then a “rip and burn” from the very same “mainstream media” reports with the addition of a personalized “my heart goes out”.
I didn’t expect someone would blog on the beach, but with all the cell-phones in circulation I thought that somebody would have called someone somewhere with news.
Pubsub was my next stop and a search for tsunami returned nothing and a search for earthquake likewise returned nothing but they indexed it for me for future searches.
ABC News has just named The Bloggers as the person/people of the year and they site Firsthand Reporting on Asian Tsunami Catastrophes, but these took days to reach our feedreaders and browsers. RSS failed miserably to separate the wheat from the shaft, human aggregators had to pan the digital stream for flakes of gold, but by then the “mainstream media” aired many firsthand accounts of all the tragedies as they unfolded.