People around the world jump at ways to try and help those suffering when major catastrophes strike. Think Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Tsunami. The blogosphere and the blogging network is an essential group and a direct resource to assist in this dimension.
Sara Ford, Grace Davis, and Dina Mehta are three people who we could all take a lot from. These women bloggers used this resource as a means to send aid and information about these natural disasters that helped thousands of people left with nothing.
Here are a few recommendations and practices they say helped their cause and should be implemented if the need ever were to rise again in such situations. Some of these tips can also be seen in some ways as practices for citizen journalism across the board.
- Help the Helper - a one-dimensional blog that dealt with the immediate necessities.
- Know who you are working with - insure that the organizations or the people over the web you are talking with are legitimate.
- No Pay Pal Button - it adds complications with dealing and directing with money and brings skepticism - just work with donations.
- Telling the Story - poignant and unedited was a more effective way to tell the stories, compared to what most people were getting from the mainstream media.
- People want to see pictures and know what is happening - directly from the ground, unedited: Use Flickr.
- Be honest in what you are capable of handling.
- Daily updates - bring people to the event through your blog.
- Be a tourist in your own town - document your city through photography to have that record and those images on file... no regrets!