My heart and prayers go out to the people of China who are living through a nightmare. Over 9,000 dead, many missing, schools and buildings leveled. The magnitude has been increased by the USGS to 7.9.

The most compelling coverage I’ve found today comes from NPR. Melissa Block was interviewing the pastor of a church in Chengdu at the time of the quake. There’s a link to her audio feed halfway down the page. Farther down, there’s the heartbreaking description of her visit to Juyuan Middle School, which collapsed in the quake. You can also read other accounts on their Chengdu Diary.

Feelthecolorz has an incredible photo, and summary of what is known so far, including links to other sites.

Shanghaiist.com seems to be down, as a second earthquake hits close to the epicenter of the first.

More as I have it.

Click here for links to more info.

Technorati Tags: china, earthquake, video, citizen journalism

UPDATE 2:57AM PDT -

Great summary by @paulbradshaw of how the news broke and a list of all search, maps and active links to information about the earthquake.

Looks like CNBC is on it. (I no longer acknowledge CNN as a credible news source, but you might find info on that site as well.

UPDATE 2:09AM PDT -

Chinese state media reports 4 Students Killed
Aftershocks so far: 6.0, 5.4, 5.2, 5.2, 4.9
Reports of school collapse

At 11:28PM PDT, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Eastern Sichuan, China. I saw reports from people reporting a strong earthquake at 11:35pm PDT on Twitter, and a steady stream of reports has been flowing by since. (USGS info)

You can track chinaquake on Gtalk. Follow @inwalkedbud , @casperodj , and @turbotodd on Twitter for on-the-ground reports.

Other links of interest:

BBC: Twitter and the China Earthquake
First photos
WorldWide Help is LiveBlogging
Estimated population subjected to earthquake shaking
Google Map of Earthquake Region
Twitter search: Summize

Technorati Tags: china, twitter, chinaquake, sichuan, breaking news

This is in response to a commenter on Steve Gillmor’s Techcrunch post, who essentially thinks any time and bandwidth wasted on a discussion of Twitter is nonsense.

For me, the value of Twitter rests entirely in instant communication, accessible anywhere, one to many, many to one. I can get onto Twitter and not follow one single person if I want. All I have to do is fire up GTalk, ask Twitter to track some keywords, and I’m plugged into a real-time news feed.

This is a capture from my real-time Twitter stream this morning. Note particularly the last entry from corvida (one of the newest Read/Write Web contributors), whose family’s home was damaged by tornadoes ripping across the Southeast since yesterday. Corvida tells the whole story here.

This is what my GTalk window has looked like for the last 12 hours. Quiet, followed by bursts of reports of tornado outbreaks, high winds, destruction, people shouting out for help, to locate others, to find a safe place, to share their worries with other people out on the stream.

Unless you have lived through a natural disaster of the type that devastates towns and cities capriciously, you cannot understand the value of being plugged in this way. But Corvida did, and she reached out. Be sure you read her whole story. Twitter reached out in a real way and helped her family, as well as four other families who were in need of food tonight.

This can’t happen in decentralized parallel universes. Or to put it today’s political terms, we cannot have red states and blue states, and still be the United States. In Twitter, of course, there are no states; just places where people are.

The value of Twitter is its universality, which is why it cannot be decentralized; at least, not in ways similar to FriendFeed, which I like well enough as an aggregator but do not consider a place to center discussion. For me, Friendfeed is the storage device; Twitter is the capture device. It scans; Friendfeed holds.

Cliff Gerrish has a great explanation for why Twitter cannot be decentralized:

It’s tracking that makes a decentralized Twitter nearly impossible. Think of a 140 character Tweet as a series of space separated tags to which you can subscribe. In this model, you’re following everyone, or at least everyone who uses that particular tag. This feature radically changes the shape of the social graph underlying the information stream. Since you don’t know who might use a tag you’re tracking, the regular RSS style contract around publication and subscription doesn’t work. Track is not commonly used today, but it’s one of the more interesting features of the service.

While there’s a ton of irony in the content of the Techcrunch comments on Steve’s post, particularly with regard to the number of characters he used to convey his thoughts, I’d suggest that they should go back and re-read what Steve wrote, because he’s right.

Technorati Tags: twitter, tornadoes, techcrunch, steve gillmor, track, corvida

I love this picture. It so perfectly depicts the differences between my Mom and me. She’s looking straight at the camera, smiling, confident (I have yet to see a camera that didn’t love her on sight), and I’m looking aside, sort of engaged and sort of distracted, all at once. Yep, that was me, flighty, flitty girl, wandering off either in my mind or body to whatever looked interesting at the time.

Were it not for the things my mom taught me, I wouldn’t have had the skills to fry an egg much less manage a life. Mom had a job from the time I was born, so to me, it was a given that women worked. It wasn’t until I was old enough to notice that my friends’ moms stayed home that I began to understand how different she was from the rest, and what a trailblazer HER mother was for not only working, but having a successful career and retiring at just about the time women were starting to push for equality in the workplace. Grandma was years ahead of her time, and she passed that same ethic to my mom, who passed it to me.

Being the drifty child that I was, I remember Mom getting in my face and telling me to use my common sense about things. If I was supposed to be home at five, I’d darn well better have a watch or a way to know what time it is, because I’m expected to be home at five. If she was working, I should be able to feed myself, and she taught me to cook the basic things early on. My mom knows how to gets stuff done. And she taught me how to get stuff done, even if it meant doing it myself and in unconventional ways. If it needed to be done, it got done. It still gets done. My mom is the best when it comes to that — she’s a go-to person.

My passion for politics came straight from Mom. She has always been involved and engaged in the political process, right in the center of it, where possible. In 1960, she worked at the Democratic convention here in LA when JFK was nominated. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, she was also working the night RFK was assassinated in LA, phoning in primary election returns to CBS so they could report in as near to real time as they could get.

I’m sure it made her mad as hell when I rebelled in 1972 and joined my Republican friends to get out the vote for Nixon, and yet she never once drilled me with I-told-you-so digs when I spent the entire summer of 1974 watching the Watergate hearings and realizing I’d been duped, big time. She had more class than that, and welcomed me back into the fold of friendly Democrats with a wink and a nod, unlike other family members who STILL needle me about it.

For all of her practical leanings, my Mom is an artist at heart and in her soul. Whether it was drawing, or painting murals on the bedroom wall, or making those sequined calendars every single year for the relatives (yes, I think she sewed sequins on about 15 years worth of calendars altogether), or making me dresses that really were cool to wear to school, or painting my bedroom in all the shades of lavender that any respectable purple-loving girl could want, my mom is truly an artist. It’s her creativity that I love the most. I’m wearing earrings that she made out of antique buttons for me, and I still have the shawl she crocheted for me back in the 70’s when crocheted shawls were all the rage. Mom showed me how to be creative, to be artistic, but still keep both feet on the ground.

Mom lives the “don’t be afraid to try” motto, which is why she ordered up a Dell laptop for herself about 8 years ago or so and went from wondering what a mouse was to being a power seller on EBay in short order. She’s not afraid to try, she’s not afraid to learn, and she’s not afraid to ask when she doesn’t understand how something works.

Above all, though, my mom is a giver. With her time, her attention, her money, and her encouragement. There was a time where we were driving somewhere and came upon an accident in an intersection ahead. Without even thinking, Mom was out of the car, helping with first aid to the victims. One of them was a hemophiliac, and no ambulances had arrived on the scene. We were about a half-mile from the hospital, so without so much as a skipped beat, Mom bundled the lady into the front seat of the car and said she’d just drive her up to the emergency room.

I can remember being a little bit scared, but mostly surprised that my mom didn’t care that this person was bleeding all over her car, that she didn’t even know her, and that she was taking over like she’d done it all her life. (My dad, on the other hand, would never have let someone bleed in HIS car…perish the thought). As it happened, the ambulance arrived just as she was going to go, so she handed the lady back to the paramedics (or whatever they were at that time) since they had on-the-spot resources to help with her condition.

Later I asked why she had done that. She explained what a ‘bleeder’ was, and asked me this: “If you had a choice between helping or not, and you knew time was of the essence, and you knew this person could bleed to death waiting, what would YOU have done?”

I have never forgotten that lesson. That was driven home clearly. If you have a way to help someone from dying, being hurt, being hungry, being sick, DO IT. Don’t let people suffer when you can help. Don’t wait for someone else. DO IT.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. In your honor, and because you taught me to, I am making a donation in your name to the BlogHer Global Giving initiative to help the Myanmar/Burma cyclone victims. Global Giving has people on the ground there, helping already, so this is a situation where giving really can make a horrible, tragic situation better. Despite confirmation of over 61,000 victims, I can still help the ones who are still alive.

Of everything you taught me, Mom, that lesson matters most. Make a difference where you can.

The donations being made to Global Giving on behalf of Myanmar are reaching people. Here is an update, posted today:

IDE Myanmar has operations in practically all of the cyclone-affected areas in the Irrawaddy Delta, and is hence positioned well to provide aid where most needed. IDE has targeted 20 township areas containing an estimated 8,000 -9,000 villages. About 125 staff have been mobilized to work in these areas - approximately six per township. The initial focus will be on providing immediate relief but rebuilding the agricultural and food security systems will receive equal priority and attention.

Project activities include manufacturing and distributing water storage containers and water treatment supplies, providing plastic sheeting for shelter, and directing cash donations to village-managed relief centers, so that they can purchase food for the vulnerable.

I would ordinarily apologize for asking repeatedly for the same thing, but I hate the idea of an oppressive government causing innocent men, women and children to die. Please give what you can.

Excerpt from the extended reports sent to Global Giving:

The immediate problem in affected areas is now survival, with water and electricity cut off, roads blocked by fallen trees, roofs torn off homes and prices for transportation and food rising fast.

“People are starving,” an unidentified resident was quoted as saying by the Democratic Voice of Burma, a dissident radio station based in Norway.

“Fuel is becoming scarce,” the resident was quoted as saying. “People are likely to die of starvation. If international help doesn’t come within a week, it will be impossible to survive. There will be nothing left to eat.”

Mr. Horsey, of the United Nations, said teams representing various aid groups were trying to assess the damage in the disaster areas, where half the country’s population of 53 million lives.
Despite concerns from human rights groups that the junta would not allow outside aid groups into hard-hit areas, Mr. Horsey said, “There are discussions ongoing. My impression is that they are receptive to international assistance.”

Some aid had already been stockpiled in anticipation of natural disasters, he said.

“It will take a few days until a complete and accurate picture of the impact and of the numbers of people affected comes out,” he said. “The road network has taken a significant hit and moving around is difficult, and the communications network is essentially down.”

Even without the destruction from the cyclone, travel and communications can be difficult in the country because of its weak infrastructure, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch.

In Yangon, he said, people usually get only five or six hours of electricity a day, and some remote areas have no access to electricity. “So the fact that electricity is down is not really that important,” he said.
Jens Orback, a former minister for integration and democracy in Sweden, was in Yangon when the cyclone hit.

“Trees that were standing there hundreds of years fell easily,” he said, “and things from roofs fell down and the electricity went down and there were only flashlights. In the first days you couldn’t go anywhere by car. No telephones worked. The Internet was out, and there was a lack of information.

“What struck us also was that in the first daylight, nobody from the police, military or firemen was out working with the devastation, but people privately were there with knives and machetes and hand saws.”

Aung Zaw of Irrawaddy Magazine said that groups of monks joined residents in clearing the streets but that in one case they had been prevented from leaving their monastery by armed police officers. As centers of the September uprising, some monasteries remain under police or military guard, he said.
In advance of the referendum, the riot police had been reported patrolling the streets in a show of force said to have been more visible than the current military relief efforts.

Technorati Tags: blogher, burma, charity, cyclone, disaster, global giving, myanmar

Despite the best efforts of the government of Burma to suppress the truth about the devastation, some news is getting out, and it’s grim:

The Associated Press: Man loses 28 relatives in Myanmar village hit by cyclone

Initially, Myanmar authorities had feared that 10,000 people had perished in the Bogalay area, which Myanmar’s meteorological department said was in the path of the cyclone’s eye. In recent days, however, officials have given no breakdowns of the toll, saying only that at least 62,000 are dead or missing nationwide.

I have read other accounts of foreign aid workers on the ground who estimate the number of dead closer to 100,000.

BlogHer has added an option to donate to the victims of the cyclone. Please consider a gift in memory of your mother, grandmother, aunt, or sister for Mother’s Day.

Getting humanitarian aid past the government and into the country has proven to be difficult. The government is stonewalling, pretending that if they lock everything down and isolate outside aid workers, they can deny that there has been any death or destruction at all.

However, there is hope. Burma’s aide to the UN has gratefully accepted offers of help, and aid shipments are expected to resume via the World Food Programme.

If the government continues to allow its people to die or go without food, shelter and clothing, I’d suggest we start dropping bombs. Rice bombs, straight to the people.

Technorati Tags: Myanmar, Burma, cyclone, disaster, aid, BlogHer, Global Giving

Technorati Tags: D70, Nikon