Archives for June 16, 2007

I’ve still been plugging away in my quest to bring online tools and social media to the realm of disaster relief.

Here is a message I recently posted on the Red Cross Online Disaster Portal – which is being hosted at WordPress.com for the time being.

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The links there roll back to my webspace – partly because you can’t upload mp3’s directly to WordPress.com – and partly because I am using a php-based link tracker to follow the downloads.

The other piece of this project is still in Beta. (I’ve been waiting to say that for a while, heh heh…) The Red Cross Twitter channel is open. We’ll push that out in selected trials for evacuations and such, but we want to limit the traffic at first. We don’t want to establish it as a primary channel until we’re sure the traffic volume won’t crash Twitter.

The idea is that people in evacuation zones could “follow” the Red Cross Twitter feed from their cell phones, and find out about shelter locations and service delivery sites.

Please let me know what you think – or if you’d like to help us test some of this stuff.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, American Red Cross, Red Cross, disaster relief, communication, social media, Twitter, WordPress[/tags]

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