Cameraphone picture [G. J. Charlet III/flickr]
After 9/11, the paper flyers of missing persons posted all over New York City stuck with Mike Tippett more than anything else.
Now this new-media entrepreneur has a company called NowPublic.com and he’s ready to take action.
NowPublic.com will make a virtual space where people can post online photos of missing loved ones lost during Hurricane Katrina. It’s called the Katrina: Missing Persons Board.
We’re trying to use the technology to help people who are having real trouble…In this case we’re trying to help people to get in touch.
Mike Tippett, founder of NowPublic.com
NowPublic.com embraces a new type of journalism guided by the principle of open-source. Users can upload and share photos like flickr.com, and the site is also capable for handling video and audio as well. Anyone can be a reporter and write stories. Tippett told me that they’ve tried to use the best aspects of other popular web applications, such as furl.com, so that users can rate each other’s reportage. Tagging stories leads to an easily navigable keyword-cloud interface.
While clouds cover the sky and families are being displaced, Tippett is hoping that the word will get out about the Katrina: Missing Persons Board. Right now the electricity is wiped out in most places. For instance, I emailed briefly with flickr-user GJ Charlet III, who gave me a view from the ground.
Internet service is pretty spotty. I’m connected to a fax line in a closet of a funeral home, using AOL, if you can believe that.
GJ Charlet III
People will be scattered. There’s going to be a real need for this virtual community.
Mike Tippett, founder of NowPublic.com
The hope is that when people come back online, the online Board will be there, waiting to help.
Perhaps the most exciting innovation from NowPublic.com is how easy they make it to freely share media content on the web. They’ve developed an interactive way to share not only content but also its accompanying meta-data. As Tippett said, it’s the “the portable functionality of information that goes with photo.” The media object–the video or the image, say–comes with an internal dropdown menu carrying its javascript and contact info for the producer.
You don’t have to be a reporter to contribute to the news now.
You don’t have to be a programmer to be able to use code now.
See for yourself what kind of information you can get from grassroots reporting.
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Other Participatory Media Content on Hurricane Katrina
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Wikipedia’s evolving encyclopedic entry on the storm.
OhMyNews.com:
New Orleans’ Next Few Hours Will Not Be Easy by
Jason Sparapani.
Flickr:
Hurricane Katrina group. Special thanks to Nika Boyce, whose post led me to write this piece.
See blog excerpts by Kenya Hudson.
You can see the damage wrought on Rodolfo Puig’s Miami neighborhood in his Hurricane Katrina flickr set.
Also please join our flickr group and add hurricane photos to our group pool. Or you can tag photos with “radioopensource”.
I’ll pass on this meta-commentary for this evening (haven’t had the time to catch very many shows in the last week), though I will pass along a recent noteworthy article by Mark Glaser in the Online Journalism Review:
Did London bombings turn citizen journalists into citizen paparazzi?
Ah, forgive me, I still get confused reading this website, this is not tonight’s show, but rather, an off-air topic to merely discuss amongst ourselves. So I may catch tonight’s “Speech In War” show when I get home.
Vanessa,
Excellent review of the flash-organized online content regarding Hurricane Katrina.
Using Flickr, we can easily create context-rich communities that are very responsive to each other and to breaking news. Many of us first coalesced around the 7/7 and 7/21 bombings in London. The same skills make fotoblogging on Katrina equally easy.
I am sure there are other fotoblog sites out there and lots of other types of blogging (I diaried our flickr content on http://www.dailykos.com and the diary remained high in the recommended column for many hours today.. people were hungry for news) but there is a continuum of community within flickr where we share pics of our kids, pets, gardens, what ever, when massive news stories do not distract us.
I really appreciate this piece you all did today because now I am a member of NowPublic.com and look forward to seeing how it might be of use for extending fotoblogging (and I am not sure what is next but thats the fun of it!)
Nika
I’ve just launched an open blog and mobcast for people interested in following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:
http://katrina05.blogspot.com/
The blog is set up so that anyone can post a blog entry, podcast or photo to the site. I’m particularly hoping that residents of the Gulf Coast will be willing to call in and let people know how things are going for them. Similarly, anyone who would like to share ways to help out, or wishes to share their thoughts on the hurricane, may post as well.
Here’s how to participate.
Post a blog entry:
Send an email to katrina2005.comments @ blogger.com. The title of your email will be the title of the blog entry, and the email body will be the blog entry body. If you don’t want your contact information, you should remove your signature file. Attachments will not be posted.
Record a podcast:
Dial 1-415-856-0205
Enter login 515-515-5555
Enter PIN code 2005, then the # key
Record your message
Press the # key to save, then the 1 key to post
Post a photo:
The website is collecting photos from Flickr.com that are tagged with the word . Simply log on to Flickr (or create an account), upload photos, and use this tag. Photos appear in the right column of the blog’s homepage.
I’ve also set up a “tag-o-rama” inside the right column of the blog. It displays links to relevant key words like hurricane, katrina and new orleans, linking to tagged content from Technorati (blogs), Flickr (photos) and del.icio.us (websites).
Please feel free to share this information with anyone who might be interested in participating. -andy
Flickr-user cybele-la posted to our flickr group:
The metroblogging group in New Orleans has been keeping folks abreast of the latest. Though most of the bloggers evacuated, they are continuing to post from wherever they are and the comments contain some great info.
neworleans.metblogs.com/
Several new flickr communities have been formed as well, including one for posting missing people and another for evacuees.
I’d have liked to track back to this piece, but can’t find a trackback ID. Have you got trackbacks turned off?
Thanks.
—Ellen Dana Nagler
http://www.thenewpolitics.com/2005/08/katrina_news_so.html