In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Ready.Gov program and the American Red Cross are adding mobile phones and chargers to its recommendations for basic supplies in citizen emergency preparedness kits. This marks both a real and symbolic step for wireless communications and social media in public emergency preparedness and response. 
The Red Cross has already changed [...]

[Read more →]

I wanted to highlight points that two friends of this blog, Robin Parker and Jon Abolins, made last week in regard to government’s social media effort during the H1N1 flu outbreak. Both of them noted that social media content suitable for computer users is not necessarily effective for those utilizing a mobile phone, and that [...]

[Read more →]

Fifteen minutes ago (at 9:58am), I received an E-mail and text alert from New York City’s Notify NYC alert system saying:
This is a message from Notify NYC. Notification 1 issued 05/11/09 at 10:00am. As per the FAA, a military plane will fly down and back up the Hudson River between the hours of 10:30 to [...]

[Read more →]

In his weekly radio/video address, President Obama addressed the government’s response to the H1N1 flu outbreak. One new topic he raised was the role of social media in communicating with the citizenry. As the President said: “The White House has launched pages on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to support the ongoing efforts by the CDC [...]

[Read more →]

In an interesting article on ForeignPolicy.com, “Swine Flu: Twitter’s Power To Misinform”, Evgeny Morozov argues that “despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform’s unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter’s role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine [...]

[Read more →]

As the nation deals with a health emergency, Microsoft has just released Vine, a new social networking application that could be very helpful to the public — providing information and locating friends & family — during emergencies.  According to Seattle’s Tech Flash, Vine aims to:
connect Facebook, Twitter, text messages, traditional phone calls, email and other forms of communication [...]

[Read more →]

At 10:39am today I received a text message and email from the City of New York’s NotifyNYC alert program saying that: “Planes observed flying over Lower Manhattan were part of an approved federal activity.” I happened to be at a hospital clinic at that moment so I had no idea what that message meant. A [...]

[Read more →]

CaliforniaVolunteers has just launched an innovative effort to reach out to blogs targeted at mothers in order to promote disaster preparedness. The agency, the lead state office responsible for coordinating volunteer activities, is organizing in-home disaster-preparedness events in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area hosted by bloggers. The sessions focus on California’s online [...]

[Read more →]

I just read about a good idea that the government of Singapore has had about briefing members of the blogsphere in advance of emergencies. According to an article in Channel News Asia headlined “Bloggers, moderators can help ease public fears in crisis”:
The Internet has made possible the rapid spread of fear in a crisis, said Deputy Prime Minister [...]

[Read more →]

Slate has a good article, “U.S. Department of Blogging: What The Rest of the Government Can Learn from the TSA” by Christopher Beam in which he argues that the Transportation Security Administration’s blog Evolution of Security is a model for governmental blogging, particularly in its interaction with the public. (As readers of this blog know, I agree. In [...]

[Read more →]