Hurricane Gustav: Aggregating the Storm
Social media itself is sometimes called a storm, a river, and so forth. So its very interesting to see all the social media activity surrounding Hurricane Gustav. The Twitters are a flutter and everywhere I look people are developing unique ways to parse and share data on the subject.The cynic in me feels that most of this effort will benefit us techies more than any actual storm victims. However my optimistic side can't help but feel there is something unique here. A community collaborating and together rapid prototyping their own solutions. That being said, there was no way I couldn't make my own contribution. Perhaps in the process we can help a few people or even give ol' Uncle Sam a few pointers.Using Sweetcron I just quickly deployed the Hurricane Gustav aggregator. It pulls in data via Twitter, Google, Flickr, YouTube and a few others. It's basically all RSS based, using certain keywords to grab the correct data from each service. The homepage displays the latest items or you click along the tabs on top to filter by service/media. Each item then links out to the original source or using Disqus, you can start a dialogue on individual feed items.Check it out and let me know your thoughts. If you have any ideas of other RSS feeds to include please let us know in the comments.What Others Are Saying:
