The December 28, 2004 edition of the New York Times (NYT) includes an article entitled “Blogs Provide Raw Details from the Scene of the Disaster” (registration required) about the aftermath of tsunamis resulting from the December 26, 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean.
Although the NYT article promises a lot (“For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs”), I was generally unimpressed with the news coverage in the blogs featured in the NYT article. Most likely, the extensive damage caused by the tsunamis has prevented many on-site bloggers from accessing the Internet in the immediate aftermath.
Of the blogs I have reviewed, the most informative posts about the recent Asian earthquakes and tsunamis are Dina Meta’s blog (“Conversations with Dina” - multiple posts) and Dennis Kennedy's blog ("DennisKennedy.com" - December 27, 2004 post). Both Dina and Dennis include a reference to Wikipedia. After reviewing Wikipedia’s coverage, my conclusion is the same as Dina’s: “This is so impressive …within hours of the disaster, Wikipedia has a most comprehensive and evolving page on the Indian Ocean Earthquake." Dina's December 28, 2004 post features an interesting and valuable comparison entitled "Blogs or Wikis...What's the best platform for building a collaborative disaster-relief resource on the web?" with specific reference to SEA-EAT, a blog Dina helped organize. Dina's conclusion: "Because [SEA-EAT] is a community that is open...[p]erhaps a wiki might have captured the spirit better?"
In addition to extensive, updated news coverage of the Asian earthquakes and tsunamis, both Wikipedia (a free open source encyclopedia) and Wikinews (an affiliated free demo news service) also provide tables of contents, cross-links to related subjects and external links to traditional, international news sources. See Wikinews for additional information about the debut of this demo news service. See Socialtext for a leading social software provider that incorporates wikis and blogs.
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