Anti-social Gustav getting social treatment on the Web

Wow, and I thought Fay was the worst houseguest ever. Gustav makes her look like a piker.

There's a lot of news and a lot of interest in Gustav's progress, and some folks on the Web are making an effort to create communication channels for sending and getting information about Gustav. If you thought the social media was just for sharing information on favorite bands and bookmarks, think again.

BK DeLong was involved in creating communication channels when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. As he explains in his blog, that communications project was called Interdictor, named after a Livejournal user who was in New Orleans during and after Katrina.

He has restarted that project to cover developments in the progress of Gustav. The hub of the project is http://gustav08.ning.com/ which brings together several activities across the Web into one place.

What kind of activities? The Interdictor project includes an IRC channel (#interdictor on freenode.net), a Twitter channel (@interdictor), and a "hashtag" on Twitter that allows all Twitter users to tag their Gustav-related posts in a certain way to get them found (#Gustav -- search for #Gustav on Twitter with the URL http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23gustav and you'll see a constant stream of updates about people evacuating, weather updates, offers of help, notes of volunteers headed to New Orleans, and so on.)

BK has also gathered a list of a list of scanner and other communications streams at http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Hurricane_Gustav . A Flickr group, ready but empty, is at http://www.flickr.com/groups/897172@N22/. And a YouTube Channel is ready but also empty at http://www.youtube.com/user/interdictorproject .

This is a lot of data, and not all of it is coming from sources you would automatically consider more reputable, like news outlets. So you'll have to take everything with a grain of salt. A lot of the Twitter posts, however, do point to news stories, weather information services, and other resources.

Would you rather get your Gustav information just from news outlets? Use Google News' location: function (which limits search results to news outlets from a specified state) and its intitle: function (which searches for your keyword only in the title of a story). Searching Google News for intitle:Gustav location:la finds you news stories from Louisiana sources that have "Gustav" in the title (this means you'll only get stories that are focused on Gustav.)

Here's a link for Gustav stories in Louisiana.

Here's a link for Gustav stories in Texas.

Here's a link for Gustav stories in Mississippi.

Good luck to everyone in the path of Gustav and trying to get out of the way!