A Wealth of Information Online

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

A Wealth of Information Online

February 2, 2003
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Once again, the Internet has proved to be an invaluable
news source in time of disaster. But yesterday's events
showed something else about the power of the Net.

Not only does it give people access to the news and to one
another but it also gives them vast amounts of information
and the ability to synthesize and disseminate it.

That was nowhere more clear than on the high-tech community
known as Slashdot, at www.slashdot.org, where members
posted more than 1,100 messages by 5 p.m. that included
links to NASA pages, first-person accounts of hearing or
seeing the breakup, the text of Ronald Reagan's 1986 elegy
to the Challenger astronauts, arguments over the future of
space travel, and the usual exchanges of insults that crop
up in any online discussion.

Within hours of the disaster, a technology consultant, Don
Drake, had gone to the radar Web site of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, downloaded images
of the orange debris trail across East Texas and combined
them into an animated image, moving every few seconds at
www.dondrake.com/archives/000112.html.

A message from Mr. Drake appeared on a respected online
news source, David J. Farber's list, at
www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people.

"There was no way to do it not that many years ago," Mr.
Farber said in a telephone interview. And speaking of the
radar images provided by Mr. Drake, he added:

"It turns out it's not something that the conventional
media does very well. It does not have the variety of
technical talent that pulls it all together. The online
world is like having, to use the vocabulary of journalism,
"thousands of stringers out there."

One person who learned about the shuttle disaster from Mr.
Farber's list is Mike Godwin, senior technology counsel
with Public Knowledge, a high-tech policy and advocacy
group in Washington.

"Reading through the postings in order, you could see the
story develop," Mr. Godwin said in an exchange of instant
messages. "As has been the case for most news stories in
the last few years, I learn about them first on the Net."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/national/02NET.html?ex=1045381239&ei=1&en=
74e9765ab8695168


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