add-ons, hurricane, myspAce, weather, widget, widgets

Federal Hurricane Response Widgets

Posted by on Sep 1, 2008 | One Comment

Imagine my surprise today as I logged into MySpace this afternoon to discover the US Dept Of Homeland Security issuing hurricane updates through Myspace! What was also of interest to me was seeing the DHS providing their web site visitors with the ability to utilize their own Web widgets powered with iframes.

Unfortunately, something the DHS did not count on is how difficult it can be for some blogging platforms to post iframes to their sites. And to be honest, reading different variations of the same thing over and over is rather boring. So I opted to kick it up a notch by using social networking tools to see what the community is experiencing.

  • Ustream – hurricane coverage is all over the place.
  • Twitter- Just using Twitter Search, you can subscribe to the RSS feed and stay up on the very latest from the perspective of regular people.
  • Reddit – Learned here that scammers are already prepping to hit new victims with fraud in the wake of the hurricane. (Yeah, I do not really consider Reddit a social networking tool in the literal sense, but it does give me some interesting perspectives.)

If you are trying to keep up on the latest Gustav updates, you can also stay tuned to the WeatherBug Hurricane Tracker for the very latest hurricane movement.

1 Comment

  1. Gwynne Kostin
    September 5, 2008

    Matt, thanks for the mention and using the widget. You are right about limitation of the IFRAME–but it was fast and easy for this very simple tool to help people find Hurricane related resources. Not as cool as video, not as personal as Twitter, but I think that these things complement each other.

    I am glad to get the feedback, that’s how we can do better! Cheers.