Yeah, I know, two weeks. What can I say, I have been overly busy again between work and a new project. Not to mention the old projects that I am trying to wrap up. Still, you would think that I could take a couple of minutes to enter something here, right?
Of course all I can say is I just hope for the best for the people of Japan. After one of the largest earthquakes in it’s history, not to mention one of the top ten earthquakes in histoy period, a tsunami that brought along more devastation, resulting in possibly catastrophic damage to several nuclear power plants, it is obvious why all eyes are on that nation now. And if that wasn’t enough, a volcano has erupted there as well, requiring even more evacuations (at this time it is not known if the M8.9 and subsequent tremors had anything to do with that either but it is not outside the realm of possibility). Number of souls lost will be in the tens of thousands although I have read elsewhere that the number could go over 100,000. A horrendous situation.
As I have been watching all this from a technology point of view, one of the things that seems to stand out to me is the fact that while it seems that voice communication has failed at times, digital communications such as texting, and other sources such as Twitter and Facebook have continued on. That was a surprise to me and I would like to investigate that further. When I first started to play with Twitter and listened to the voices on how this was such a tool for emergencies like this my immediate response was ‘What good is it if the infrastructure goes down?’ If in fact digital communication continued while voice communication ceased, how could that be? I would very much like to know what the redundencies were here and how their infrastructure was laid out. After all, if a cell tower was knocked out here I have seen BOTH voice and data go bye bye. Maybe that has changed now and it all passed me by. (That wouldn’t be surprising since a lot of stuff has gone by and I never noticed.) Before this weekend I always assumed that additional lines of communications should always be maintained should the phone system go down, such as amatuer radio and CB radio. So now I have more of a desire to know what the differences were in Japan.
I have also noted the effect of these social networks and how the media is dealing with it. There are differences now that are evident as the major news sources are using these social outlets to accumulate information. This is a topic that could go on for a lengthy amount of time but I will just say that there is no doubt that social media and social networks are changing the face of news distriution and reporting. And depending on who you ask, it is changing for better OR for worse.
And, oh yeah, March Madness and SXSWi are in progress. Like I said, in comparison to what is happening in Japan these are a little down on the list of things to discuss, although I should have something to say about it later.
