Rapid Assembly of Facts During the California Fires

Posted on October 23, 2007
Filed Under Web 2.0 |

With the fires raging in California, which of the many ways of getting information stand out as the best in these times?

The California fires are being watched by a lot of people, everybody has somebody in California. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks compiled a view of how the social media networks were being used to update status.

“Putting the various sites together shows an almost live look at what’s going on across the region. One thing I do notice is that there is no central keyword or search term to find everything, everyone lists their content in a different way.” -

From the majority of posts in the comments section, it looked like social media was more noise than signal, except for Twitter, doing a great job with new information.

Most commenters felt that the organized news stations were the only continuously updating, reliable sources - the bloggers were sporadic. The Union-Tribune blog was posting new stories every 1-3 minutes at the time of this writing.

CenterNetworks included Mahalo in the roundup, not because it’s a major site, but because it “has a mission of helping users find what they are looking for better than typical searching.” How well did it do with compiling the latest breaking information?

“Both pages are good attempts at organizing the information, the California fires page is somewhat current, Malibu fires is a bit more outdated. The California fires page shows videos from yesterday but most of the news is from today which is good. I would suggest they point to searches on YouTube, Flickr, etc. to keep that page updated with more current information.”

So it’s inconclusive from this brief glance which method of compiling information rapidly is most useful in dire need. Human-edited Mahalo seems less efficient than the wisdom of larger crowds, yet editor supervision has a high value for reliability when you know the editorial source.

The platform of twitter is fast, but word for word probably no faster than a blog - and all content hinges on quality of source for the highest and best signal. Accredited sources with a mandate to stay awake at their post are premium. Trust is everything.

Comments

2 Responses to “Rapid Assembly of Facts During the California Fires”

  1. Lon on October 24th, 2007 2:00 pm

    Hey, Lon Harris here, head of the Mahalo “News” team. Thanks for the mention and for checking out the site! We’re very new to this kind of news aggregation and are still learning how to follow important breaking stories like the So. Cal fires, so any feedback at this point is extremely helpful.

    I totally agree that keeping the pages updated, particularly with images and video, is crucial to our mission, which is why we do try to have YouTube and Flickr searches (along with any alternatives that might provide better coverage) on every News page. It’s an important point.

    Thanks again for your insights and Mahalo!

  2. Hunter on October 24th, 2007 3:21 pm

    fwiw I looked at danny sullivan’s recommended Google map cluster, and I couldn’t get anywhere intuitively from there, went back to the news blog
    -ross

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