you asked for a hurricane blog
So now you get it.
I’m in Baton Rouge, La., & watching the hurricane warnings swirl around me (no pun intended). Since Dave Winer & others seem to be interested in people blogging the event from a local perspective I decided to start up a new blog & post as long as I have power.
If you’re interested in my little citizen journalism dispatches about Hurricane Kristina, then check out http://hurricaneupdate.blogspot.com/.
The AP is reporting that there is a free guide with tips for bloggers and dissidents to sneak past Internet censors in countries from China to Iran:
Reporters Without Borders‘ “Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents” (pdf) is partly financed by the French Foreign Ministry and includes technical advice on how to remain anonymous online. It was launched at the Apple Expo computer show in Paris on Thursday and can be downloaded in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, English and French.
According to the article, the guide has:
For more than a week I have been blogging Hurricane Katrina. The blog has been linked to by many other blogs & received a fair amount of media coverage - including articles in the New York Times & USA Today.
The best attempt I could do to sum up my experiences as an “emergency” or “crisis” blogger was published in an op-ed in the Washington Post on Saturday:
These blogs no longer belong to the blogger but to the community, as a centralized mechanism for communication and comfort in the face of natural disaster. They amend the coverage in several ways.
First, they are an alternative viewpoint from which one can learn about the situation. Turn on the news and see reporters pelted by the storm. Open newspapers to find pictures of Katrina. Or get direct access to a living room inside the storm and live through it by reading a blogger’s account.
Second, bloggers cover a larger geographical area, reporting more quickly than journalists. Imagine TV news without the set-up time and news production process: That’s how quickly bloggers can disseminate information.