Thursday, January 13, 2011

The power of the blogosphere

Out of the carnage of the flooding in Queensland emerges a story which illustrates the power of the blogosphere - the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

A LONE blogger updated the world on the parts of Brisbane marked to go underwater for more than 24 hours after the city council's website crashed on Monday night.

Self-described online community manager Greg Williams published the Brisbane City Council's collection of flood maps of greater Brisbane on his website Lexiphanic in response to requests for information.

When the council's website went down that night, he became the sole keeper of the vital resource. His site drew 199,833 visitors on Tuesday, before the council revived its overloaded server yesterday morning.

''I put my little site together late on Monday night and told people in Brisbane about the site with a couple of posts on Twitter and one on Facebook,'' Mr Williams said. ''When their site still didn't return, and I heard that a lot of people still needed information, I took it upon myself to keep the site up to date.''

Mr Williams reduced pressure on his web host by keeping his site static and making maps downloadable. Queensland Police yesterday thanked him.


Well done that blogger! That's a great story as to how one person and his computer can make a difference at a time of crisis.

That man deserves a XXXX!

3 comments:

pollywog said...

damn...going off the title i thought the blogger had called on God hisself to step in and save the banana benders

so it came to pass...

Adolf Fiinkensein said...

pollywog the peurile.

jabba said...

what do you mean a xxxx, give him a proper beer