NEWS: Blogging Katrina

GEEK: Blogging Katrina: Part 1

Kaye Trammell, an assistant professor in mass communication at Louisiana State University and Baton Rouge resident, manged to maintain her blog as Hurricane Katrina came, knocked out all of her services, and went. She posted continuous updates from her Blackberry device to keep her friends and family abreast of her conditions.

Her blog highlights a continuing trend of on-the-spot reporting that we saw emerging out of the Iraq War, and witnessed again just a couple of months ago, when passengers on London's subway used their camera phones to document the aftermath of the bombings there.

Josh Hallett says public information officers should help their local bloggers distribute news.

Hallett mentions that during one storm, he was the only one in the area able to make phone calls because his Blackberry used GSM networks while the TDMA/CDMA networks failed.

This sort of instant journalism certainly comes with some troubling caveats, such as the reality that fact-checking flies out the window, and hoaxes are difficult to spot before they proliferate. However, any negative side effects are far outweighed by the public service this phenomenon can provide.

True. The problem is that by the time they're uncovered as hoaxes (or, in the much more likely case of reporting that includes factual inaccuracies, once they're corrected) it's often too late, and the facts of the matter don't spread as quickly as the original story.

That said, I still think that's a minor price to pay to have the rapid spread of information when something happens (or, in some cases, any information at all).

[Edited on Aug 30, 2005 by bean]