Shouting, 'Fire'
Posted: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 3:35 PM by Will Femia
The online coverage of the California fires shows continued innovation in how the news is being reported. The two new items I see this time around are Twitter reports and custom made maps.
The first time I saw breaking news covered with Twitter was during the earthquake in Peru. Now I see it in use in reporting on the California fires both by regular people and news outlets.
Most of the folks making their own maps are using Google's myMaps feature. I remember when this came out and the only thing I could think to do with it was map out my driving routes to work. Now we see it in use by individuals, governments and news outlets to relay vital information.
There's an amazing collection of maps at a blog called "And still I persist." As I click it now it looks like traffic has brought it down but hopefully that will be resolved soon so I'll keep the link here for you to check back. They have custom maps that include individual houses touched by fire and areas covered by the smoke plumes, photos and informative links. A really impressive amount of work going into this, I hope it's restored soon.
Speaking of blogs with features we haven't seen before, this one has a collection of time lapse videos of the fires taking over the landscape. (I see they're posting so much it's already been pushed into the archives. Here's a direct link to an example. In case you have trouble, these loaded more quickly for me on Firefox than IE for some reason.) They credit the videos to this site, which has feeds from wireless web cams. I can't find any that are showing the fires directly, however. Maybe I'm missing it.
Speaking of blogs, all the local news outlets are keeping them active and updated. The ones I clicked:
The Calfire blog comes with audio clips, though I had to scroll back to yesterday to find one that would load. The audio is of a robot voice reading incident reports, evacuations and other fire conditions. It sounds like it's using text to voice technology.
Speaking of scrolling backward, I looked to the entries before the fires on this San Diego real estate blog and found photos of the kinds of houses that are no doubt threatened or already burning right now.
Infinte Monkeys is blogging the fires in the tradition that made blogging the force it has become. Frequent, copious updates with good links local insight and a personal sense that reminds us that real people are involved in this story.
I'm not sure what to call the pages that have been set up by Rim of the World and Kithbridge. Information pages? They're not blogs exactly but they're being updated with important links and information. Rim of the World is hosting message boards as well.
The TV folks keep showing a NASA map of the region with the smoke billowing out to sea. Notice there's a link at the bottom of the text for a huge version of the photo. I also clicked this sky view.
Speaking of spotting smoke from space, yesterday I was able to see smoke show up on the radar of the Weather.com animated map. Now they've fleshed out their map offerings to cover a variety of Southwest perspectives.
With so many people directly and immediately affected by the fires we've seen a spike in the number of submissions to our FirstPerson project. (That video from James Fabin is really amazing when he pans the camera.)
So too, the traditional (mainstream citizen journalism?) sites, with both Flickr and YouTube showing lots of results in searches on California fire.
The Kithbridge site has a disclaimer that's easy to forget in the whirl of volunteer reporting and information.
"Again: do not rely on unofficial sources to make decisions regarding your safety: these links are provided for information only and Kithbridge assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of their information. Listen to your local authorities, and when they say evacuate --- get out!"
If there's anything I'm missing that you think is worth sharing, please let me know.
