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The 2006 hurricane season started in June and we have been lucky this summer with only two named storms so far. Last year we were not so lucky. Brian pointed out in his photo blog on Flickr the work he did on the Slidell Hurricane Damage blog last year after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at our disaster blogging efforts.
Our effort began on August 27th with a post where I suggested, “Hurricane Katrina - Get Out!” Brian and his family were able to leave the small town of Slidell, just across the lake from New Orleans, and get to Dallas before the storm hit. Next, NOAA started podcasting the Hurricane as reported here. I wrote another post on August 30th describing the background behind the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog where I described the reasoning for the creation of the blog:
Everytime Brian and I would talk he was telling about the lack of news from the area. He had little tidbits, but no one had the full story. The picture to the right is the bridge to Slidell. I suggested that he start a blog where he could share his feelings and information about Katarina and its wrath (this seemed obvious since he runs a blog consultancy). Anyway, he had one of the techs set it up and within an hour he was posting. Shortly thereafter a reporter from CNN IM’d him asking for information, next Brian’s high school buddies were calling him after they read the blog and all sorts of people who had little bits of information were contacting him.
Later that day I reported that our church was taking donations of money and food to help victims who fled to Baton Rouge. By this time Business Week, CNN, Boing Boing, Instapundit, Doc Searls, NevOn, PRspeak, Fred Wilson, Robert Scoble, Ochman, Tyler, Windley, David Parmet and countless others had promoted the site sending thousands of visitors to our posts over the course of the day. We raised over $100,000 in donations that we could confirm, and perhaps thousands more that we never were able to track from these visitors.
Tragically, both this blog and the Slidell Blog attracted thousands of comments from people searching for their friends and family on the Gulf Coast. The comments, like this one, were heart breaking:
Mac Pearce wrote:Â Desparately seeking info on safety of 82 yr old uncle that refused to leave Slidell. He is ALONE at following address : 750 Teal Dr. off Pontchartrain & Kostmayer adjacent to Abney Elementary (white Jeep in driveway). We evacuated to Mobile and cannot make it back. If possible, PLEASE make attempt personally or by notifying Police Dept. that Mr. Billy Dubourg at above address may be desparately seeking assistance. ANYONE that can respond to me by E-mail ( tmpearce@——–.net ) would be GREATLY appreciated !! Thank you, Mac Pearce
By September 5th I reported in a post titled, “Weblogs Work for Small Towns” that the Slidell blog had attracted more visitors than lived in the entire town. The totals were as follows: 316,533 hits, 47,201 vistors, 258 posts and 2,000+ comments. By the end of the blogging effort over 410 posts were made on the blog and over 91,000 comments (some of those are obviously comment spam).
Brian wrote about the lessons we learned in a post titled, “For Recovery 2.0: Disaster Blog Lessons Learned.“Â I think he summed up the net-net result of the blog when he explained,
So, we started the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog to make the information come to us and to make all damage information on Slidell easily available.
The information truly flowed TO us - we did not create anything - simply create an outlet for consumer generated news from the area. It was amazing. Brian created some bullets for future disaster bloggers to think about:
Information is a necessity. Speed matters. As the sign says, neighbors need info as well as the other supplies.Obviously the Slidell blog has outlived its usefulness as a resource, but remembering how it served Brian, his community and our lives continues to provide a useful lesson. We are proud to have been a part of the effort!
Weblogs Work is now part of Big in Japan! It took us a year to determined that weblogs do in fact work, but they are simply one social media tool a business or agency should consider. As a result we have decided to consolidate the Big in Japan and Weblogs Work brand into one with a renewed focus on helping businesses and agencies build turnkey social media programs by providing a broad spectrum of social tools including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, forums and feeds. Don’t worry, the Weblogs Work weblog won’t go away, it will continue to provide a place for the Big in Japan team to blog about social media. Can you believe it has been a year?
On April 12, 2005 I wrote the first Weblogs Work post titled, “Business Blogs the next big thing (that is already here)!” In July we began offering ‘blog consulting’ services to small companies. We also started having our programmers build various tools for our consultancy to effectively host shared and dedicated, single and multi-user blogs. Soon our clients got larger and our projects more complicated. Our programmers started building even more customized tools like elfURL, PodServe, FrankenFeed, InstantFeed and SocialMail. We even created a brand for our social tool effort called Big in Japan.
Almost ninety days ago it became obvious we had a choice to make. We could build an agency and expand our social media consulting practice or we could change our focus to exploit what we were already uniquely positioned to provide. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan are both brands owned by Spur (the holding company I manage). Spur also owns an IT support brand called Architel. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan had been stealing resources (data center space, servers, programmers and engineers) from the very start and it became clear we were very good at building, customizing, managing and supporting various social tools. Very few companies had the experience and resources to do what we were doing on a daily basis.
Just before the 4th of July we bit the bullet and decided to refocus our offering to provide agencies and brand managers enterprise class social tools complete with hosting, management and day-to-day support. Here is an example of our most popular offerings:
Want to learn more? You can reach me directly at 1+214.550.2003 or just send me an email. We look forward to hearing from you!
[Left to Right: ur hipster Noah Glass, prankster Biz Stone, personal publishing provocateur Evan Williams]
Odeo was an early entrant in the podcasting market that has grown and changed so much in the past year. We talked with Biz Stone and Evan Williams about Odeo’s focus, the new features they are rolling out and where podcasting might be going.
Check out Odeo and Odeo Studio, and follow the story on their blog.
Listen to the podcast:
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Dan Saffer, senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path, has a new book coming out called Designing for Interaction. We met up at the AP offices when I was in town last and had a great chat about what makes for great interaction design, how you allow for (encourage?) hackability, and much more. The book was an excellent introduction for me (the non-designer software dabbler) into the current thinking about user experience & interaction.
For more, check out Dan’s blog, the AP blog, and the interviews Dan has conducted for the book. Dan & I will also be doing a panel with Kit Seeborg & Jeremiah Owyang this month at WebVisions 2006.
Listen to the podcast:
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Pick a nickname, select IRC as the server protocol and select irc.freenode.net as the chat server (no proxy, port 6667). Now you are ready to join the Spur chatroom just type: #spur and you are in.