John Schwartz wrote an insightful piece for the New York Times this week about the role blogs play in covering and responding to the tsunami disaster. I was interviewed for the piece, but the people who really have something interesting and valuable to say are the ones over there, on the ground — and the folks rolling up their geek sleeves to assist.
From relaying first-person accounts (like Sanjay/Morquendi's SMS reports in Sri Lanka), to kick-starting relief efforts (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, and the Post-Tsunami Reconnect project), to questioning media coverage (Ethan Zuckerman's post about Myanmar), there's a lot going on here The amateur-shot image shown here ran in the NYT story. Snip:
"At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: 'Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The 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.' His postings included a photo of a body on a sidewalk with a buffalo walking by. 'It now seems prophetic," he wrote, "for according to the Hindu mythology, Lord Yama (the god of death) rides on a buffalo.'"
Link to story.
Fox News did a segment on this subject yesterday. I spoke with anchor Jon Scott about some of the blogosphere reports we've been pointing to from BoingBoing in recent days. Here are video clips of the Fox News segment: Real, Windows (Many thanks, Mike Outmesguine, for TiVoing and kindly hosting.)
There have been a number of related stories out in the past 24 hours in the Wall Street Journal (Link, sub required), Libération (France) (Link), the Inquirer (UK) (Link), and AP (Link). (Thanks to BB readers including Jean-Luc for pointers).
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