Tsunami blogs

No mood for celebration this evening. The magnitude of the disaster is ingrained in our consciousness. The official death toll has now reached an incredible 135,000.
The New York Times says that for vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs:

Bloggers at the scene are more deeply affected by events than the journalists who roam from one disaster to another, said Xeni Jardin, one of the four co-editors of the site BoingBoing.net, which pointed visitors to many of the disaster blogs.
"They are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that other media just can't," with an intimate voice and an unvarnished perspective, with the richness of local context, Jardin said.
That makes blogs compelling--and now essential--reading, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and a blogger. Once he heard about the disaster, "Right after BBC, I went to blogs," he said.
"This notion that we now have eyes and ears around the world is more than something we've grown accustomed to; we've grown to demand it," he said.
Bloggers at Worldchanging.com, some of them living in the affected nations, began chattering immediately after the waves hit and began discussions of ways to help. South Asian bloggers created Tsunamihelp.blogspot.com to direct people to aid organizations. "I haven't seen this level of people saying, 'You know what? We can do something here. We can connect the pieces,'" said Alex Steffen, who lives in Seattle and edits worldchanging.com. "It's mind-blowing, and it's inspiring."

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