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

I’ve been meaning to write a full blog post on this blog for quite a few days now, because with the conventions, McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin for his VP, and now with the approach of Hurricane Gustav, there have been so many thoughts going through my mind. If you’ve been watching my Twitter this past week, you’d get an idea of what I’m talking about.

However, it’s clear that Hurricane Gustav is set to repeat history, making landfall in almost the exact same place at almost the exact same time and with almost the exact same strength as Hurricane Katrina did three years ago. There are many things that fascinate me, and hurricane seasons are one of those things. I’ve been spending this weekend tracking and watching Hurricane Gustav’s progress as much as I spent lots of time in 2005 tracking its record-breaking storms. There are so many things ironic about this storm that I’m just flabbergasted to thing about it.

But I’ll leave that to another blog post. I’m not a so-called “live blogger,” I prefer to wait until events have progressed and I’ve had the ability to digest all of the information. There are a lot of thoughts from this past week (and likely more coming up this week) that I want to blog about and I’ll be doing that later this week.

However, the important thing right now is that Hurricane Gustav is now just hours away from making landfall near New Orleans, and it looks to be a disastrous storm that even Mayor Ray Nagin is saying will be worse than Katrina. All I can say is that I hope that most people have managed to evacuate in time. For those who chose to stay, and for those who have left their belongings behind, my sympathies, hope, and prayers go out to you in the hopes that you will be safe. Here’s also hoping that the aftermath of this storm is not the kind of chaotic disaster that the country witnessed three years ago, and that it is not used for political purposes during the revving-up political season.

In short: be safe, and here’s hoping that this storm will strike as lightly and as quickly as possible so that all of you can rebuild your lives. Our thoughts are with you.

Tags: Gulf coast, Gustav, hurricane, Katrina, Louisiana, message, New Orleans, prayers, storm, sympathy