Thursday, January 06, 2005
Tsunami Blog Among Top 10
According to online competitive intelligence service Hitwise, the SEA-EAT blog – the brainchild of Peter Griffin, a fellow Ryzer – has rated tenth with market share activity increased by 1,926 percent between December 27 and December 31.
U.S. visits to humanitarian Web sites increased 180 percent by January 1, 2005 compared to the prior week. Through the Tsunami Help blog, "we see the ability of blogs to get information out and expand among news reporting. We are seeing an evolution of the way people are getting information; people are coming from news sites and referring to the blog site," says Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise.
According to an article in the Guardian the tsunami may have a profound effect on blogs as a news medium.
These self-published sites have played a huge role in the telling of the horror that struck – and continues to strike – south-east Asia, and it seems inevitable the impact of their role will reverberate on long after the disaster, and subsequent relief effort, have faded from our newspapers and TV screens.
This new blog world – in its decentralised, unorganised way – has done an amazing job in the last nine days. It has reported and reassured, breaking the news in wordsphotographs and sounds and video. Then it moved the story on – at the point much of the mainstream media was only beginning to catch on to the full scale of the disaster – to tell more of the human tale of the tragic aftermath, and help the rest of us donate towards the aid effort.
...for those watching this small, comparatively insignificant world of media, this may also be remembered as a time when citizen reporting, through the force of its huge army of volunteers and their simple type and publish weblog mechanisms, finally found its voice, and delivered in a way the established media simply could not.
...weblogs are serious, not just toys. Weblogs are about human lives. Weblogs can be profound
