A group has been trying to set up a low-power radio station in the Astrodome to broadcast emergency information, job offerings, lost children, etc. Every obstacle has been put in their way. They were required to hand out 10,000 radios. They did. They were told there wasn’t enough electricity. They brought in their own batteries. FEMA still won’t allow them to broadcast. Sounds ridiculous to me. [Technorati tags: hurricanekatrina]

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I’m just so proud that I had to hang on my blogwall:

Yes, yes, I know this is hardly news to people outside of America or to those so deeply into America that they drive a Hummer or other armored civilian transport vehicle. But for our Volvo (“The Car that Cluetrain Bought”), it’s just a special moment.

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Salon recommends this slide-show-with-music, although I actually found the Icelandic dirge sound-track offputting. But you’ll find the usual collection of amazements at Flickr, under the “hurricanekatrina” tag. It’s hard to pick just a couple, but here’s a view of the storm from on top and a view I hadn’t seen of the inside of a Hercules aircraft. My own preference is to view the tag as a slideshow, clicking through at my own speed. [Tag: hurricanekatrina]

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The Katrina People Finder project is up and running.

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From the Bookner home page:

The publishing industry is a mess. Neither publishers nor literary agents are interested in discovering new writers, because unpublished writers are an unknown risk. Hence we have a surreal situation where it is easier for a pro wrestler to publish a book than a writer.

Bookner lets your manuscript get peer-reviewed and rated so that — perhaps — a literary agent or publishing house will notice. It’s free to writers and, for now, free to agents and publishers.

Interesting idea with ways it could wrong and some ways it could go right. (Go write?) [Tags: publishing books literature]

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This is a great idea:

Donated money? Please donate a little time. Join the Katrina PeopleFinder Project.

It’s easy. All you need is an internet connection and the ability to copy data into a form

After Katrina many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who want to let others know they’re okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it’s almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites – making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We’re requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.

To get started please click here

Questions? Email katrina-people (at) activist-tech.org

Thanks!!!

The Katrina PeopleFinder Team

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I’m flying back from Linz today, and then getting on a bus to join my family for Labor Day, which is already in progress. I’m blogging from the Frankfurt airport after the most thorough pat down since my honeymoon.

Last night, after the Ars Electronica conference ended for the day, there was a light, sound and airplane extravaganza on the banks of the Danube that defies description. It told the story of a Linzer woman from WWII to the present and featured fly overs by various air craft, very large screen displays on barges, and go-go dancing from the buckets of cranes. Also, a sound track so loud that it was like getting a back massage. Very hard to interpret what it meant to the Linzers.

Afterwards, 12 of us wandered through the city looking for dinner and ended up in a Viennese restaurant where all 3 carnivores at my table got schnitzel. A lovely time.

And now, as my 15 minutes of T-Mobile wifi ticks away, I “look forward” to hunching in my seat trying to avoid the aggressive adjustments of whoever is in the seat in front of me. As I get fatter and fatter, the angle of my laptop on airplanes gets more acute. I alaready have trouble inserting my meaty knuckles. Another couple of pounds and I’ll be typing with chopsticks.

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I’m about to get on a red-eye to Linz, Austria, for the Ars Electronica conference (art, technology society). I come back on Sunday.

I’ll blog from the conference…

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I’m at foo camp, north of SF. It’s O’Reilly’s get together for geeks (and also some people like me). No time to blog…too busy foo-ing…

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According to the AP:

Infants have been stopped from boarding planes at airports throughout the United States because their names are the same as, or similar to, those of possible terrorists on the government’s ”no-fly list.”…

You know, I think I’m ok about age-ist profiling that says our security forces should focus on terrorists whose age has reached the single digits.

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