Katrina and Citizen Journalism

As you all know (unless you live beneath a rock during the last week), hurricane Katrina had ravaged several US states in the Gulf of Mexico, and pratically destroyed a large part of New Orleans. While what we had got from the media has been nothing but bad, wait till you start reading this blog (relay from the Daily Source Code blog):

http://mgno.com/

Man, this guy really is amazing, maintaining (or should we say: guarding) an office in the middle of the city, while law & order went completely out of business and all sorts of atrocities happening all around them.

Of course, this is not the main point I want to bring up. The main thing is that : because the guy has a blog and was stuck in his office, he can use the blog as a tool to bring news to the world. This is what citizen journalism at its best. When you see US government being slow at the rescue and cleanup operations, we also see the power of independent publishing in full swing. Just two years ago, this kind of on-site reporting from ordinary people to the world was not likely. Let's hope the guy doesn't get his a$$ shot off and ride out okay.

Update: the ISP of DirectNIC might go out if they don't get fuel for their generators later tonight (Asia time). So, for those of you who want to follow the situation, you better go to the website above before it is gone.

2nd Update (Sept 4th): DirectNIC has finally secured their internet connection, so the guy will continue to feed information out. Police and military presence has picked up, finally.