California Fires Archive

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

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

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good attempts at organizing the information, the California fires page is somewhat current, Malibu fires is a bit more outdated.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

• Edware Vielmetti submitted the following 2 news Twitter streams: @kpbsnews and @nateritter

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