Lorelle VanFossen has just written a great blog post about using blogging as a communications tool during natural disasters–particularly relevant given the recent landfall of Hurricane Gustav. Her blog post is a bit long, but certainly worth reading, so I won’t take the time to summarize what she wrote. She does, however, point out some of the many ways that blogs were used both in Gustav and in Katrina back during 2005 to provide local information about the storms, to provide communication to others about the local situations there, as well as providing other kinds of vital communication. (And, this year with Gustav, Twitter also played a major role in that as well.)

However, a lot of this ties into what I really think is going to become more and more commonplace as the internet continues to evolve and mature, and quite frankly, this really is what blogging is about. In my opinion, one of the biggest aspects of blogging is that it provides a medium through which independent people can become journalists in their own right. If you were to just watch the news media to see the latest on Gustav or any other local disaster, you’d only get to see what the news media would want you to see. But go onto Technorati or Google Blog Search and start searching the blogs, and then you get to start getting reactions from actual people, many of whom were actually there and can give their own unique perspective. And that really is one of the ways that blogging is helping to rejuvenate the First Amendment here in our country: it’s allowing ordinary people to provide resources and information and opinion and other kinds of things that the national media wouldn’t be able to give us.

This is one of the many things that blogging is all about.

Tags: article, Blogging, disasters, Gustav, hurricane, Lorelle VanFossen