Katrina
I try to keep the blog fairly light, so you'll have to excuse this serious post.
The Internet is becoming a place to get at incredible amounts of information, at all levels of "filtration". Suppose you're looking for information about areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. You can get accurate but very filtered information at any number of sites (msnbc, nytimes, etc.) You can get somewhat filtered data from somewhere like news.google.com, which compile lots of data from lots of sources, most of which are reputable but some of which are sketchy.
Then there is the unfiltered data. Stuff that could be totally wrong, and can easily give you a skewed impression of what's going on. That you can find at the nola.com weblog. That link will give you the latest postings, or click here for an archive of the postings I saw when I wrote this.
Quite simply, these postings are sickening. 5 people stranded here. 80 there. 100 here. All posted in the last hour.
I'll save any political commentary about how rescue operations should have been done faster. And I recognize that some of these posts might not be genuine. ("Hey, I'll post that there are 100 people trapped even though there is only 1 so they'll come and get me faster!") But I do think that this may be a case where the filtered headlines like "Convoys bring relief to New Orleans" might be somewhat misleading.
The Internet is becoming a place to get at incredible amounts of information, at all levels of "filtration". Suppose you're looking for information about areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. You can get accurate but very filtered information at any number of sites (msnbc, nytimes, etc.) You can get somewhat filtered data from somewhere like news.google.com, which compile lots of data from lots of sources, most of which are reputable but some of which are sketchy.
Then there is the unfiltered data. Stuff that could be totally wrong, and can easily give you a skewed impression of what's going on. That you can find at the nola.com weblog. That link will give you the latest postings, or click here for an archive of the postings I saw when I wrote this.
Quite simply, these postings are sickening. 5 people stranded here. 80 there. 100 here. All posted in the last hour.
I'll save any political commentary about how rescue operations should have been done faster. And I recognize that some of these posts might not be genuine. ("Hey, I'll post that there are 100 people trapped even though there is only 1 so they'll come and get me faster!") But I do think that this may be a case where the filtered headlines like "Convoys bring relief to New Orleans" might be somewhat misleading.
posted by Eric at 5:50 PM
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