Latest Death Toll: 110,000 and rising...
Photo via Heterotopias
The Indian Ocean Earthquake is proving to be the event that finally turned the World Wide Web into THE mainstream media.
All those books that we've been reading finally begin to make sense: The Tipping Point, The Wisdom of the Crowds and Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.
WebLogs, Wikis, Flickr (imagery), Event Alerts, e-mail, have all been deployed to best effect.
It seems the only way to handle a catastrophic event of this scale is by managing the problem from the bottom up - indeed the most noticeable thing about the whole tragedy has been the extraordinary absence of "top down" leadership.
Wikipedia is cited on page 2 of the Times this morning.
"The tsunami has its own exhaustive and updated entry in the online encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org"
and, from the same article, "for the best overall picture on the disaster and the International relief effort, try www.reliefweb.int"
and, "the Sri Lankan tourist board has set up www.contactsrilanka.org to help people track down missing relatives there."
Grim stuff.
And puts our own quiet lives into perspective.
