Textually.org has found a new blog, The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, which has set up an alert system using SMS. The idea is that people in the tsunami affected area around the Indian ocean can SMS problems and observations to the blog which will put them up as soon as they are received. This is a good idea since people in the area will have far more access to their mobile phones than to any other medium to report problems – although the blog is on the net. Users with WAP should be able to see it, though. There are a couple of problems that need to be ironed out: keeping out static messages and outright fraud (such as that fish virus hoax). I also think some of the messages will be confusing.
However this idea has definite merit, and should be able to be transfered to other disaster areas in the future without having to go through the same learning process.
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