Firestorm 2.0 - Using Social Media Services to Track The California Fires

Written by Allen Stern - October 22, 2007
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Today my thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by the fires in California. The pictures show a scene straight out of a war movie. I thought it would be interesting to look at how the popular social media services are being used to report on the fires. 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. An idea would be to create "crisis centers" and aggregate the content together for easy locating.

Flickr

  • Flickr is adding one image per minute on the top tags for the fire. Check out Irvine Fire and Santiago Fire for examples
  • Terry P has a good number of photos on the Santiago fires

Fire

YouTube

  • YouTube is showing several thousand videos when you aggregate the various searches. The top search is california fire returning close to 3,000 videos.

Sample video:

Google

  • Google news keeps track of the news from sites that they consider news worthy
  • Google blog search includes basically everyone else
  • The LA Times has a Google Maps mashup showing where the fires are burning (hat tip to Robert Scoble)
  • Another mashup of San Diego allowing GPS and coordinate submissions

Fire

Facebook

  • A search returns nothing on "California Fire"

MySpace

  • A search returns nothing on "California Fire"

Mahalo

  • I have included Mahalo, not because it's a major site, but because it's new and has a mission of helping users find what they are looking for better than typical searching
  • Mahalo has pages for: Malibu Fire, and the master page California Fires
  • 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good attempts at organizing the information, the California fires page is somewhat current, Malibu fires is a bit more outdated.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

Wikipedia

  • Wikipedia has a great overview page of the various fires, locations and links to news

Twitter

What other sites are doing a good job of social media during these troubling times?

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Submitted by Anonymous on October 22, 2007 - 8:06pm.
Subject: zoomr

zoomr has a few pics on the fires but not many:
http://www.zooomr.com/search/photos/?q=california+fire

Submitted by Edward Vielmetti on October 22, 2007 - 9:33pm.
Subject: real time coverage by twitter

i'm watching fire news from two twitter streams:

@kpbsnews

@nateritter

nate is doing awesome work

Submitted by Jeffrey Johnson on October 22, 2007 - 10:09pm.
Subject: Pict'Earth Imagery over San Diego Wildfires

Pict'Earth (http://pictearth.com/) will be collecting high-resolution imagery over the fire-affected areas with RC/UAV devices as well as traditional airplanes, and will publish it on our website with MS Virtual Earth, Google Maps, Google Earth etc ... as soon as it is safe to do so.

Submitted by Duncan on October 22, 2007 - 10:20pm.
Subject: i posted some stuff here

http://www.thelastminuteblog.com/california-wildfire-information/

Submitted by Anonymous on October 22, 2007 - 10:25pm.
Subject: Wow this is crazy! I got some video and pics of this..

Check out these videos and pics of the fires here:
http://topictrends.com/topic/california_fires

Submitted by amal ekbal on October 23, 2007 - 1:42am.
Subject: KPBS (PBS station of san

KPBS (PBS station of san diego) has a very useful google maps mashup for San Diegans showing fires, evacuation information, shelters

http://www.kpbs.org/static/maps/oct07_fire_map.html

Submitted by amal ekbal on October 23, 2007 - 1:45am.
Subject: KPBS (PBS station of san

KPBS (PBS station of san diego) has a very useful google maps mashup for San Diegans showing fires, evacuation information, shelters

http://www.kpbs.org/static/maps/oct07_fire_map.html

Submitted by Anonymous on October 23, 2007 - 2:52am.
Subject: Social and all that crap

I live in San Diego . The most trusted source of information for me is NBC news or Fox News local or san diego union tribune. All this social news is a bunch of bull and not giving any useful information.

Only upto date source of information is these news channel and some good news website. A few bloggers created so called Google Mashups and forgot to update it after a while.

This is one of the few times I felt craiglist killing union tribune and other news papers can actually lead to more disasterous impacts to quality of news.

Being in midst of this, helps me realize the importance of organized media who are ready to put their lives at risk and get the right information.

Submitted by rebecca on October 25, 2007 - 5:28pm.
Subject: media coverage

first a big thanks to people who write blogs like this and the biggest thanks of all to the staff and customers of signon San Diego/San Diego UT. It's not hard to believe that once again, San Diegans were left to burn by the televised media. It's something you always hope will change and it always does. Too bad it's for the worst. Oh well not here to bash anyone they have to live with themselves, I sure couldn't live with myself if I was that biased. Again Union Trib rocks. San Diegans were portrayed as scum of the earth but last night people were hanging together and helping one another and there really are some great people in San Diego county. Trust me we weren't getting our backs rubbed anonymously at the Q either.

Submitted by Scott Kingery on October 23, 2007 - 1:26pm.
Subject: Good sources

I'm from Scripps Ranch and evacuated last night. Posting on twitter (@techlifeweb) and monitoring various sources.

The Red Cross is on Twitter (@RedCross). My favorite blog so far is the one from the San Diego Union-Tribune
http://sosdfireblog.blogspot.com/

Submitted by Rodger on October 23, 2007 - 6:57pm.
Subject: San Diego Residents Reporting Fire With Mobile Videos and Pics

Hi Allen,

NBC San Diego has received nearly 1000 mobile video and picture messages from San Diego residents using Veeker to document their experiences of the fires.

I just made blog post about this:

http://blog.veeker.com

Best,

Rodger

Submitted by Jeremy on October 23, 2007 - 11:14pm.
Subject: San Diego Fire Mashup

Travature, like many San Diego based companies, has had to temporarily close our office. To keep track of the changing news, we quickly threw together a San Diego Fire Mashup: which has a Flickr photo stream of the 100 most recent photos of the fire, two real time news feeds (one from KBPS News and the other from SignonSandiego / San Diego Union Tribune), and the KPBS Google map of the Fire area.
We were using it internally so we could keep track of the sites we were checking a little easier, but decided to offer it up to others people to see if anyone else found it beneficial.

Check it out at travature.com/fire

-Stay Safe San Diego

Submitted by Edward Vielmetti on October 24, 2007 - 2:08am.
Subject: twitterwhere - geo search for twitters

twitterwhere is a new feed tool for twitter that gives you a piece of the public timeline broken down by geography.

this is an rss feed of twitters near san diego:

http://twitterwhere.mattking.org/rss/92122/30

("within 30 miles of 92122")

based on that it looks like @10news is also doing timely news twitters - KGTV TV in San Diego

http://twitter.com/10news

the twitterwhere feed is handy.

Submitted by Gary on October 25, 2007 - 12:04am.
Subject: Message Board Started

I started a Yahoo Message Board for people looking for or providing information about the 2007 California Fires.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/2007_California_Fires/

Submitted by Dave C. on October 26, 2007 - 2:46pm.
Subject: LA Times app

The LA Times has also put together an app to help check on evacuees.

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