Hurricane Katrina: Bizarro New Orleans

Watching the images of the Morial Convention Center raises memories of all the hours I’ve logged in that building over the years. Anyone who has been to a big convention there has seen or waited in the long lines for buses or cabs, walked miles and miles — at CTIA in March one sponsor gift was a pedometer — and been held hostage to the food services. Usually, at some point in every show there’s a moment when I think it’s hellish and I’m thrilled to escape; when it’s typical New Orleans weather, I’m relieved to go inside to the air-conditioned comfort.

Then I look back at  the people who really are being held hostage to circumstances, who are stuck in a surreal version of those lines that makes the lamented 40-minute convention waits seem like a breeze. Superman comic readers will understand when I say it is Bizarro New Orleans.

It is familiar and completely unrecognizable all at once.

Hurricane Katrina: Managing The Information Flow

First, a thank you to Robert Scoble, Nancy White, Jon Lebovsky, Julie Leung,   and others who helped get this conversation started. (8:18 am: Terry Heaton, I didn’t mean to leave you out.)  I also want to point you to a couple of other resources — my OPML blog with Katrina links and a new wiki at OJR tracking coverage, missing persons connection efforts and resources. Please stop by the wiki and contribute any links you think should be included or leave them here and I’ll do it.

If anyone can figure out how to convert the wiki to an OPML file as it’s updated please let me know. (Dave Winer, thanks for putting out the word.) David Newberger, I’ve added some resources to the wiki that might help in your efforts to build a Google map database.

Now for the hard part. More and more information is popping up on line and I don’t think collecting links is enough. Just to narrow it down to one area, very specifically, can anyone help figure out how to aggregate all of the personal status reports (missing/safe/lost/found, etc.) into one searchable database or other searchable format? Ideally, we’d be able to do the same by zip code, neighborhood, parish and other formations but if we could just accomplish an aggregated people finder that would be a huge accomplishment.

In the very short term, maybe a badge for sites with personal status reports would help or some kind of web ring/network that links them all together.

Related: Hurricane Katrina: What Can We Do?
Hurricane Katrina: Grasping the Concept

Blog Day 2005 (squeezing in under the wire)

Metrobloggers: A collection of city-specific blogs.

Making Light: I don’t read this New York-based blog often enough. Eclectic; often amusing and insightful. Some good Hurricane Katrina coverage.

Global Voices Weblog: Making the world smaller by connecting us to each other. Pick any country and browse; you’ll find as many blogs to follow as you have time.

Arse Poetica: Thoughtful. Striking photos. Political. BlogHer.

NEGROPhile: Link blog with commentary on all things African-American. Intelligent. Almost always interesting.

Hurricane Katrina: What Can We Do?

What can we do? Many people are already on their way as volunteers but, as in December, for now the most significant gesture most of us can make is a cash donation. (Some options: American Red Cross; Salvation Army; United Way; United Jewish Federation; Catholic Charities.) Leave it to the agencies to provide food, clothes and other supplies.

Another immediate need: information and information management.
Communications are completely cut off in some areas; it’s a crazy quilt
in others. People who have information to share may not have a place to
share it; those who need it may not know where to look. Some are going
to Craigslist.  Many bloggers are doing a great job but often on
the most micro of levels and not always easy to find. The Times-Picayune and other media in the hurricane’s path have
done an amazing job but many of them are in the same straits as the
people they are covering. People will need jobs, places to stay,
information about their homes, ways to share.

Philip Katner wrote me today to ask for help reaching Google with a
request; he heard from a mutual acquaintance that I knew a senior engineer there. The native New Orleanian is trying to do anything he can think
of from Washington D.C. that will help his  parents, five siblings,
friends and the extended, now far-flung New Orleans community.  Some
excerpts from our exchange:

Staci,

Please help, if you can. … Communication is direly needed for evacuees as well as emergency
personnel and they could tie it to their maps, with flood levels, body
counts, trapped individuals etc.  If there’s anyway you can help
everyone from NO would be most grateful. The best websites are extremely limited: nola.com and  wwltv.com. Thousands of us can’t locate relatives, friends, basic information
on our homes, etc.  The "504" exchange is all but dead, as is Biloxi
and now Baton Rouge’s.  Anything that Google could provide would be
helpful.  More than just the news link they currently provide.

My family (4 of 5 siblings accounted
for) and my folks are spread out across several states, in hotels and
friends houses.  Though most had "504" cell phone exchanges,
they’re all but unusable.  Several don’t even have electricity. People have started using Craigslist.com
to post lost & found for family members.  People are giving out
their addresses, telephone numbers, anything in hopes others will find
them.  New Orleans has always been impoverished and many families are
close-knit, never moved away from home … so once evacuated will have no
where to go where they’ll know people.

Each of the neighborhoods in NO is distinct, at varying levels of
height relative to sea-level.  Most people identify with their
neighborhoods.  Having maps they could click on to exchange
information would be an incredible gift, wonderfully intuitive and
would also help link up lost people to possible neighbors, friends and
family members.  Many of the more informative blogs are just
thousands and thousands of messages that are organized by Parishes. …
My sister and I, with access to cell phones and email and web and
cable TV having been coordinating communications through numerous
friends and family members and work colleagues… but it’s extremely
primitive."

Taking Philip’s idea beyond Google
alone, what if the sites making a push in  local search applied some of
those resources to New Orleans and other ares battered by the
hurricane? Instead of pointing to restaurants and business that no
longer exist, provide zip-code information centers incorporating data,
maps and photos from FEMA, the Corps of Engineers and other resources.
Create spaces for people to meet online — and publicize it. Create an
uber-directory that pulls it all — volunteer efforts and professional — in one place. Work together to span
sites and portals.

Being local is easy when it’s about the best place for dinner. Helping communities recover from disaster, now there’s a test.

Related: Hurricane Katrina: Grasping the Concept
Hurricane Katrina: Managing The Information Flow

            

Hurricane Katrina: Grasping The Concept

I spent two months-plus covering the Mississippi River Flood of 1993 — boating across the baseball diamond in Davenport, surveying damage from a Coast Guard helicopter, sitting in tents talking to evacuees, accompanying people through the ruins of their homes. I was standing on a sandbag levee still being fortified when it started to give and got away just before it blew with a burst of sound and rush of water. I thought I knew what a flood could do.

I grew up knowing my hometown of Memphis was at risk and I wondered
back in 1993, as we watched water creep up the Arch grounds,  what
would happen if any of the levees protecting St. Louis was breached.  Listening, watching and reading about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, though, I realize that 2003 was only a taste compared to what can happen when a hurricane brings flooding in its wake. At the same time, I see my worst fears of urban flooding being played out — all while I sit in a dry, comfortable house in suburban St. Louis.

And I wonder how many people across the U.S. who responded so swiftly to the awful tsunami in SE Asia last December realize the scope of the devastation. I just got off the phone with someone who felt compelled to act then but hasn’t come close to grasping the gravity of what is happening now in our own backyard.

Dozens of people, possibly hundreds, are dead. Hundreds of thousands are without homes for now and into the foreseeable future. Communities are gone. A city that  withstood wars is losing battle after battle with nature; it will be years before anything approaching a real recovery can take place. As I write, New Orleans — a city most of us only know when life is pouring into the streets — is being completely evacuated because it is no longer livable. 

An unknown number of lives are not the same and never will be.

Hurricane Katrina: What can we do?

Hurricane Katrina: Managing The Information Flow

New Orleans From The 36th Floor Before Hurricane Katrina

I waited a few extra hours for a room with a river view on my last trip to New Orleans.  These were taken through a full-length window on the 36th floor of the New Orleans Sheraton on March 14, 2005, the day after I experienced a St. Patrick’s Day parade on Magazine Street. I’ve been thinking about that view all day and about the giddy fun of the parade, trying to keep those images superimposed on my mind while tragedy floats by on the screen.

View Of New Orleans From 36th Floor Of The Sheraton

View Of New Orleans From 36th Floor Of The Sheraton II

No Women Voters For This Year’s BCS Poll

Every so often, something pops up on my radar to remind me how much further women have to go when it comes to sports. The latest example comes from Joanne C. Gerstner,  president of AWSM (Association of Women in Sports Media): the 114-member panel voting on the weekly ranking for the BCS does not include a single woman. AWSM quickly expressed its concerns to the BCS and to Harris, which is administering the poll. According to the BCS, the 300-person pool —  from which Harris randomly selected the participants — included "a few women." The nominees from each conference were supposed to be former coaches, players, administrators and media.

No recourse for this year but AWSM has been asked to contribute potential panelists for next year; it’s  not a guarantee of inclusion but at least the pool will start off with a higher potential to include some women panalists. (That’s assuming the controversial BCS poll doesn’t implode before then.) As Joanne wrote to members: "We need to get involved, so there are no excuses for
future panels. We demand women be represented."

Women certainly are represented in other ways when it comes to college football — as journalists, administrators, cheerleaders, season ticket holders, merchandise buyers, just to name a few.  We shouldn’t have to demand that women be represented in the BCS or similar endeavors but we still aren’t anywhere close to a time when that might be the case.

The same newsletter included a new PayPal option for renewing dues. Done.

Coda:  It was 25 years ago this summer when I had the chance to shadow Atlanta Journal baseball writer Tim Tucker. My first trip into the Braves clubhouse was memorable, to put it mildy. Three years earlier, SI’s Melissa Ludtke bravely pushed back when Bowie Kuhn excercised his power as commissioner of baseball and told her she couldn’t cover the World Series alongside her male colleagues; the locker room was off limits. She went to court backed by Time Inc. and won in time for the 1978 World Series. In response, Braves owner Ted Turner bought his players bathrobes to wear whenever women were announced. The problem the night I went in: someone decided it would be more fun not to make the announcement. We all survived.

Criticism Of Crime Coverage Criticism

Criticizing coverage of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba has turned into a sport. It’s not hard to see why it is this generation’s "Francisco Franco is still dead" story or why it’s easy to criticize much of the coverage. But anyone who forgets grief, tragedy  and quite likely death lie at the heart of this story only makes matters worse. Try putting the name of someone you love in place of hers as the punchline and see how funny it feels. It’s possible to criticize coverage without diminishing the victims —  maybe a little harder, but doable.

Coda: An ongoing missing-person’s story here in St. Louis has me thinking about the potential harm of what has become a campaign against "missing white woman syndrome" using national media frenzies as examples. Amanda Jones, a nine-months pregnant single white woman,  disappeared Aug. 14. Her story has been in the news here since soon after her car was found abandoned that day — and rightly so. After 20-plus years in this market, I truly believe the attention level  would be the same for a woman in similarly vulnerable circumstances with any color skin — particularly one  whose family or friends can sound the alarm.  I hope no one whose life might be saved by shedding a little light is ever kept in the dark because a news organization thinks covering the story is politically incorrect.

What’s Voice Got To Do With It

Someone asked the other day  what I thought telephony/VoIP/internet phone had to do with media and entertainment content. In the strictest sense, the two seem like separate businesses with little crossover (save ownership in some cases). But the boundaries are shifting with increased access to free or cheap voice communication over the internet paired with the spread of broadband and improved audio quality. More commercial content providers are incorporating some form of telephony or audio chat, including  video games with live voice interaction. The lower price barrier enables global collaboration and with it more creativity and collaborative content. For instance, numerous podcasts include VoIP interviews or co-hosting from multiple locations, unthinkable for most at land-line or mobile long-distance rates.

I don’t agree with the enthusiasts who say that voice makes everything easier. Time shifting by email has its place, as does communicating by IM (particularly useful during conference calls or situations when audio would be difficult or inappropriate). And, face it, it’s still not foolproof. But  integrating voice into the internet — in media and entertainment, in business, in personal communications  and preferably in meaningful ways — carries powerful possibilities. 

How to increase traffic, publicity and, possibly, ad revenue in 500 easy steps

Feedster could have it nailed — skip the top 100. Start a monthly list of the top 500 "most interesting and important blogs," populate it with heavily linked-to blogs and provide a big badge that links back to your site. Add a pitch to join your ad network.

It’s an attention-raising business play but there’s also the less cynical aspect of how Feedster is trying to answer the questions raised increasingly  about links and blog referrals. By expanding the size, Feedster ‘s list opens more doors and the methodology makes up for some of the glitches that mar the Technorati 100. Feedster explains that the ranking "is achieved by taking into account factors such as the
number of inbound links over time; if the blog has been recently
updated; and the elimination of obvious non-blogs that have appeared on
other top-blog lists."

More  from Feedster’s Scott Rafer, who attended BlogHer and heard the link debate first hand, and from Scott Johnson, who acknowledges the usual suspects on the list but adds, "there are tons of bloggers on this list that I bet you never heard of."

It’s still a tip-of-the-iceberg solution that identifies blogs popular enough to garner a certain number of links. We need some vertical solutions, too, that take us deeper into subjects and communities. (Jeff Jarvis is pushing About.com’s blog guides — he’s a consultant to the company and just discovered knitting blogs that way. ) I’d like to see a mix of editing and technology; the human touch for qualitative, the technology to uncover voices that might not otherwise be heard by more than a few people.

Coda: A version of this, essentially the lede, originally appeared on paidContent.org
but is no longer available. I mention
it because it was seen by some readers but isn’t on the pc.org site.