The aftermath of the China earthquake

When I was preparing a workshop for some journalists at the BBC, I came across a couple of blogs written by husband (Paul) and wife (Lara) in English from Chengdu, China.

I particularly like this post by Lara, who teaches Applied Linguistics at Sichuan University.

In it she describes life one week on from the earthquake: telling her students that this year's class is over, standing outside as sirens ring out in memorial to the dead, noting the pride of the Chinese people in their government and soldiers.

A piece written by Paul a few days ago, which includes pictures of the tents people have been using, also makes interesting reading. He says:

"Class politics is playing itself out here, as parents from poorer areas are asking why their schools were so shoddy that they collapsed, while those from more wealthy schools just down the street survived. After days of protests, a group of parents planned a march to Chengdu to demand answers. At first, a local Communist Party official pled with them, from his knees no less, not to march to the capital. They also offered the parents $4,500 per child if they would just keep quiet. Finally, they corralled the protesting parents onto a bus and drove them to a meeting with local Party officials, hoping to avoid the embarrassment of going over local officials’ heads."

Links for today: China and Searching the Web

More reaction on Twitter, Blogging and the China Earthquake

• Death toll rises alarmingly.
  
• Twitter backlash begins - it was useful but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
• The Times reports that Chinese bloggers reckon somebody should have known this earthquake was going to happen. After all, when over a million butterflies migrate (who counted them?), frogs show up on the streets of Mianyang and 80,000 tonnes of water disappear from a (surprisingly large) 'pond', that clearly says 'earthquake imminent'.
  

Searching the Web - moving towards quality not quantity

• Not content with inventing the World Wide Web (honestly, I'd have sat back and decided that sort of achievement was not likely to beaten), Sir Tim Berners-Lee and some of his friends have been given some money for a Transparent Journalism project. They're attempting to develop a way to 'source tag' news articles, which would be included in online searches. So, for example, you could filter out all news articles that weren't based on eyewitness accounts.

• While we're on this theme, try checking out hakia.com. It's a search engine that attempts to search the web semantically.
  

Twitter and the earthquake in China

Much excitement among new media types this morning at the ability of Twitter to provide up-to-the-minute information on the Chinese earthquake.

Earlier in the day, Rory-Cellan Jones, technology correspondent at the BBC, described twitter as an 'amazing way of tracking Chinese quake news'. In fact, he thought his discovery that the tool was not merely a 'fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives' was worth a quick blog post.

Paul Bradshaw has an excellent summary post on how Twitter can be used for newsgathering with links to various other places. He suggests that this sort of crowdsourcing is far superior to some of the more traditional methods of journalism:

'How quickly would a journalist have found someone who speaks English and was affected by the quake? Or an image? '

If you really want to take advantage of this resource you'll also need:

• Tweestscan, allowing you to search 'tweets' for key words like 'earthquake'

• Twitterlocal, enabling you to track down tweets from China, (especially useful with a dose of Google translation)

• Tweetburner, which means you can track what other tweeters are linking to. (Alpha Twitter does a similar job.)
  

By all accounts, following self-confessed 'tech geek blogger', Robert Scoble, on Twitter also helps.