Posted on 12/29/2004 11:24:16 AM PST by ckilmer
Bloggers offer witness accounts, ways to help quake and tsunami victims
2 hours, 50 minutes ago
NEW YORK (AFP) - Blogs from around the world are offering instant witness reports from the region affected by the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that the traditional media cannot match, as well as links to relief groups for readers seeking to provide immediate help.
AFP Photo
Blogs became an important means of communication and information following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States. The phenomenon has now reached global proportions with the explosion of Asian blog sites and sites dedicated to the southwest Asian disaster.
Worldchanging.com, a site that focuses on long term social change, does not normally cover news. "But the Indonesian earthquakes and their aftermaths are clearly something more than your average news story," reads a posting by one of the moderators.
The site now has dedicated most of its main page to disaster related postings and recommendations on how to help.
At another site, sumankumar.com, a blogger from the Indian town of Chennai, wrote that relief workers "could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped, and the half alive were carried to safety."
"Stop surfing, do something now," wrote American Greg Hugues from the United States. "This is the right time to stop what you normally do, get out of your little digital world ... and come back to reality" to help those in need, he wrote.
At www.command-post.org, a site created in March 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq (news - web sites), there is a page with extensive links to global and even small local groups throughout the affected region seeking disaster relief assistance.
Another site, tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, was slapped together in a few hours by some 30 bloggers from the region, including Ajay, a 22 year-old Indian student, Bala, an information engineer from the US state of New Jersey, and Samit, a young writer in the Indian city of Calcutta.
The site urges bloggers from around the world to volunteer for posting duties. "It would be nice having people around the world taking this up in shifts," a notice on the site reads.
The phenomenon is "the continuation of a chapter, of a trend that started on 9/11 in the (United) States, where the news channels didn't have a lot of information," so people in New York and Washington began blogging about what they saw, wrote Jeffrey Henning, a top official at Perseus Development, a US company that conducted a blog survey at several of the leading blog hosting websites.
Television "is pretty repetitive on these things, they don't have a lot of information, they don't have a lot of footage, so it tends to tell and to show you the same things over and over again," he wrote. "People watch that for a half-hour, then they hop on line to see what more information they can find."
Blogs however should not replace professional journalists, said Robert Thompson, who heads the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York state.
"But they are useful because they can do a lot of important work, they are very good at getting lots of information rapidly," he said.
The big news media organizations keep offices in large cities "but they can't be everywhere. The world of blogs means you get correspondents everywhere," he said.
I think we should try to setup a central thread to co-ordinate relief efforts on FR.
Why not? Still need somebody to air false accusations against President Bush repeatedly? Someone to give the MMM free airtime? Someone to call for new laws and new regulations no matter what happens where, to whom?
A thread where you can find relief organizations to help:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1309697/posts
I started two threads that have links to charities on them.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1310283/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1310188/posts
If you like the American Red Cross, Amazon has set up an esy on-line payment at http://www.amazon.com You can use your Amazon account just as if you were buying a book. The money is specifically dedicated to the tsunami relief.
The USAID has a list of charities that work in that region here:
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/asia_near_east/tsunami/ngolist.html
The important thing is to give a charity you like some money.
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