WC Archive

I've said it before, I'll say it again: You guys rock!

You guys are doing terrific reporting here at WorldChanging-- truly setting an example for all independent online media to follow. But I would be wary of "blog triumphalism" just yet. I find the Tsunami Help blog a bit ill-designed. It's 500KB to download; how useful is this in the field? I don't think we should discount the work of professional aid organizations who have long been using information technology.

I wrote a little more on this topic at:
Online Political Writers: reactions to the Tsunami

Jon ... just the reason why we are now migrating lots of the resources we have collected onto a wiki, with a faceted classification system with a clear TOC that will allow quick and easy search and access. Work is underway but its already up and running. There's a link at the blog on the right panel to the wiki for now.

Jamais, Alex thanks for the thumbs up and support ... we're all a little overwhelmed with the way its evolved. Peter Griffin got the ball rolling - he is truly worldchanging ! We cannot begin to tell you how amazingly this group has self-organised, come together and collaborate on this project. With loads of support from you folk and so many others. We do believe what we are building is a blog-wiki or "call-it-what-you-may" model for the future where social technologies can and are going to change the way we work and organise for the future ... lots of learnings from this project .... will share that story soon. Right now the focus is on building it - to give people a resource that they can go to for/to help, in the relief process.

Hi Jamis,

Its a pleasure and duty to let you know about the coverage. Its is an honor for me to be associated with my fav. personalities on BBC world, where my efforts to raise funds using blog are also covered in the same segment.

Jon, I wouldn't quite characterize my reaction as "blog triumphalism" -- if anything, I think the hands-down best work came at Wikipedia, so I'm more inclined to "wiki triumphalism" -- so much as "blog reconsideration." I think the US presidential election was, on balance, a bad thing for blogging -- lots of people started doing it, yes, but the quality was in general quite low, and most political blogs were little more than misbegotten combinations of partisan chest-pounding, consipiracy theories, and talk radio-esque rants. And, worst of all, they actually accomplished little in terms of changing the course of the election or the tenor of the debate, in my view.

The blogosphere's reaction to the tsunami, conversely, was much more in harmony with the strengths of collaborative networked media -- fast changes, multiple links, and the ability to make peripheral voices heard more readily. It's not so much that blogs did it better than other media, but that they did it better than anyone who watched the electionblog frenzy in October and November would have expected.

I don't think we should discount the work of professional aid organizations who have long been using information technology.

Actually some of what tsunamihelp and other blogs have done is point to, and coordinate information about, professional aid organizations.

(Thanks for the positive notes about WC, btw.)

Thanks for the work on the wiki, and on the outside links. I stick by my word of caution, simply because the blog angle was the first thing that "The World" covered, and was also first in the New York Times. Though note that I first recognized the criticality of this when Jon Lebkowsky sent a note to activist-tech saying that "a blog has been set up..."

Jon