Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Something that’s been fascinating me over the past few weeks during all the weather weirdness has been how incredibly valuable Twitter has been in keeping track of everything that’s happening. The #seatst (Seattle Twitter! Storm! Team!) and #pdxtst (Portland Twitter! Storm! Team!) tags were the single best sources for moment-by-moment information during the snowstorms, #waflood is still running strong for tracking flood info, and last night I was reading about an #earthquake in California just minutes after it happened. I’ve been enjoying Twitter for day-to-day trivialities and quick bursts of drivel that wouldn’t be worth making a full formal post for, but it’s Twitter’s growing usefulness as a crowdsourced quick-response news channel is mindblowing.

Of course, I’m far from the only person noticing this trend, and there’s a neat article at Publishing 2.0 (which I found via a #waflood tagged tweet from Evan Calkins this morning) looking into the creation, evolution, and use of the #waflood tag over the past few days.

The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be.

Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

That’s how a quiet revolution began in Washington state Wednesday. Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story.

But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person.

It’s a great look at how the collaboration allowed the journalists and their respective news organizations to stay on top of the stories, and put together stories and information pages that were far more comprehensive than if they’d each stuck to their own individual “old media style” resources.

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).

Seth said the December snowstorm link roundup was on the homepage for three or four days — but it was the site’s most-trafficked story for the entire month.

[…]

This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.

Compare the Washington group’s great waflood link roundup to a Google News search for “Washington flood” — I know which one I’d rather have as a resource if I lived in that area.

Neat stuff. Even though I’m “just” a consumer, not a journalist in any sense, and not involved with or affiliated with any of these organizations, I’m fascinated by the effects of the evolving connections that technology is making possible between the media and the public, and within and among the various media organizations themselves.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

First off, the good news: we’re not being affected by the current weather craziness hitting the northwest. While we’re near the Green River, which is pretty high at the moment — the National Weather Service Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service has one checkpoint on the Green River, near Aburn (just south of us), which shows it at ‘Action Stage’ but already crested and predicted to drop (check other NW area rivers here — it doesn’t look like it’ll be flooding in our area.

That said, this is nuts! This stormpocalypse hit us in two stages: first the snowpocalypse, and now the floodpocalypse (yes, the nomenclature is silly, but that’s part of the fun). I’ve been watching #waflood on Twitter, and it’s been fascinating watching all the updates appear.

It’s also neat seeing just who all is involved with this method of awareness and communication. In addition to all the “normal people” giving updates, the Washington State Department of Transportation is using WSDOT and @terpening (as well as their Flickr account, the city of Bellingham, FEMA (a far cry from Katrina!), the Red Cross, King County, and probably plenty of other official organizations are joining in. Lots of good information coming out…even when the information isn’t good:

Washington Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond says Interstate 5 at Chehalis could be closed for four days.

The Transportation Department is monitoring the flooding. The DOT says I-5 is closed from US 12, milepost 68, to Grand Mound, milepost 88 in Lewis County due to the rising water in Dillenbaugh Creek south of Chehalis.

Hammond says the flooding is similar to the December 2007 flood that caused a four-day blockage on the main north-south route in Western Washington.

Hammond says when the Chehalis River crests Thursday night, officials expect water to be 10 feet deep over the highway. After the water starts falling, crews plan to use pumps and breach a levy to help the water drain out.

Hammond says about 10,000 trucks a day travel I-5 and the financial impact of the closure on freight movement is about $4 million a day. That’s made worse by the closure of the three major Cascade passes.

In fact, according to an early morning WSDOT tweet, “There are no north south routes available between Seattle and Portland, or east west routes from Western WA to Spokane at this time #waflood”. Unless you want to go to Canada, Seattle and its surrounding metro area is essentially completely cut off!

Crazy stuff, and I’m counting myself quite glad to not be directly impacted by any of this — though it came close, as Prairie’s dad sent us a shot of the Lewis River just outside his house in Woodland (in southern Washington, just north of Vancouver, which is just north of Portland).

The river holding, the rising has slowed, four feet to the top of the bank, then four feet to the main floor. Am watching close, a fireman rang the door bell, said be ready to evacuate, have been planning but have taken no action, hope that I don’t have to scramble.

It sounds like the river didn’t get quite high enough for evacuation, but that’s pretty close!

So…what’s going to be Stormpocalypse Part III?