Envision a vast human-machine collective focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Across the web we are participating in a vast clustered hierarchy of people, systems and services. We have our own national news commentators, the new Walter Cronkites, serving us richly-pointed roundups like this one yesterday. The web scene demonstrates power law effects, of course, but with new centers and nodes emerging all the time. To some real and valuable extent the collective system is adapting in real time to the changing phases and needs of the crisis.
Along side emerging democracy we have “emerging responsibility.”
Given the trememdous expansion of web the resources, and the diversity of information–e.g. news, missing persons, disaster relief, donations, people-to-people outreach, blogs, photos–it has been very helpful to have people and web services create lists, outlines and directories of what is available.
Some of the most thoughtful observations of the web response to Katrina are at blogs.opml.org, such as this post yesterday from sdk:
http://blogs.opml.org/sdk/2005/09/02
Which was noted on OPMLsearch.com
Lists, outlines and directories are the ultimate flexible tools to keep track of and point people to relevant information in an expanding ecosystem of online resources.
There are now several forms being used to help with the Katrina disaster:
Mainstream search engines are first to respond because they are automated. Their automation makes them lacking in human judgement, but given the density of interlinking done by the web community on the Katrina issue, the search engine page-rank systems are doing a reasonable if-not-great job of bringing important information to the top.
Blogs and web pages with links are at the other end of the spectrum. They feature human voices and human selections. They are also quick for a single person to set up, easy to find by way of the blog-oriented as well as mainstream search engines, and usually available in RSS. For example, the woman who owns “katrina.com” has made it into an information center for disaster relief. Cyberjournalist.net has a number of pointers to bloggers who in turn are making blog-based lists of people blogging Katrina. Craigslist is perhaps the most bare-bones and poignant, with its Craigslist resources for Katrina Survivors.
Wikis are easy for a community to access and update, and are proving the most valuable comprehenive directories during these critical first days. See the Katrina Wiki. And of course, the WikiPedia Katrina listing is excellent. And the NOLA dump Wiki is wild. It’s motto is “better to dump it than lose it.”
Social bookmark sites are easy for users to participate in, but (in my view) have been disappointing in their output. Not enough sorting and selecting, it seems. The best selections are put together by individuals with an editorial theme, such as this from gisuser.
Public news aggregators, such as katrina.newsilike.com are starting to make a contribution.
OPML outlines seem a natural, and there is now a translation of the Katrina Wiki into OPML form. The OPML community is coming together to make and share lists of continuing relevance. It might be helpful if a team of folks using the OPML editor could work together using the “instant outliner” feature to find, share, and organize links.
