Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Blogging a disaster

The importance of blogs as an information source continues to grow. From today's New York Times comes this story.

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help. . .

That makes blogs compelling - and now essential - reading, said Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York
University and a blogger. Once he heard about the disaster, "Right after BBC, I went to blogs," he said.


In theory, it could be difficult to find the blogs that are covering a particular event, but all one has to do is visit the more popular blogs and you will usually find that someone is providing appropriate links. In this case, Instapundit and the Moderate Voice, among others, are acting as traffic cops to get the wider blogosphere directed to the bloggers on site. It is truly fascinating to witness.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. (Thanks for the link Glenn.)

Trackback:

No comments:

Post a Comment

COMMENT: