Date: Thur, September 28 2006 00:02:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - September 28





                                SuitWatch -- September 28, 2006
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 DIY and the Open World Ecosystem

   The Day Fire in Southern California started on Labor Day and has been
   burning across the Sespe Wilderness and the Los Padres National forest for
   most of September.  As of yesterday morning, its size approached 150,000
   acres, or about 233 square miles.  It was 42 percent contained, with 59
   miles of containment line still not built.  Close to four thousand
   firefighters and other professionals are fighting the fire.  They are armed
   with 226 engines, 45 bulldozers, 41 water tenders, 30 helicopters, 7
   helitankers and 10 air tankers.  I watch these take off The estimated cost
   of suppressing this fire to date is $45,538,309.  It is the largest fire in
   the nation right now, and the largest in recorded California history.

   Yet until yesterday no structures had burned.  That's because we're talking
   about some of the wildest wilderness areas in the world.  The elevation
   range is the same as the Grand Canyon's, and the topography is nearly as
   forbidding.  Maybe more so.  There are canyons that look like mazes and run
   thousands of feet deep.  Thick wooded mountains top slopes and cliffs of
   crumbling sandstone.  There are only three larger roadless areas in the 48
   contiguous states - even though the fire began near the busiest Interstate
   artery in the West, and the whole area is on the approach path to Los
   Angeles International Airport.

   Two weeks ago, when the winds were blowing westward, the Day Fire gave
   Santa Barbara the worst air quality figures in its history.  Overhead was an
   ominous river of smoke.  Ash fell like snow.  About an inch of it drifted on
   to the uphill side of my windshield wipers.

   Yet the fire isn't my main subject here.  My main subject is the need to
   supplement -- or replace -- the broken official systems for distributing
   news about the fire.

   Outside the large cities, there are no longer any local news stations worthy
   of the label.  Our only full-time news station in Santa Barbara is little
   more than an audio edition of the local newspaper, which is at war with its
   editors (23 so far have resigned), mostly just carried Associated Press
   stories about the fire, and lacks a useful website.  (Nearly all its
   "content" is locked up behind a paywall.) The radio station has no website
   at all.  The only large news station in Los Angeles, KNX/1070, is also busy
   with lots of other stuff.  As it stands today, only Ventura's KVTA/1520
   http://www.kvta.com/ has any measure of local coverage, and it's minimal.

   The Ventura County Star http://web.venturacountystar.com/ is covering the
   story aggressively, and features a confusing multimedia page
   http://web.venturacountystar.com/special/2006/09/fires/fire_holder.html
   of links, scrolling text and animations.  If there's an RSS feed, I can't
   find it.

   The most "official" of the fire sites is InciWeb.org
   http://www.inciweb.org/, which aggregates and publishes "incident" news
   from a raft of agencies, including the Los Padres National Forest .
   InciWeb's url for the Day Fire is http://www.inciweb.org/incident/475/.
   Far as I can tell, nobody has been able to get onto it since Monday,
   September 25.  No new RSS feeds have gone out from InciWeb either.

   Other official sites include the Los Padres National Forest
   http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/lospadres/, the Ventura County Sheriff's
   Department http://www.vcsd.org/day_fire.html and the Ventura County Fire
   Department http://fire.countyofventura.org/.  None of those have RSS
   feeds.

   I could waste time looking at other local and regional media websites
   (including the many TV http://cbs2.com/firewatch/ stations in Los
   Angeles), but it's not worth the bother.  The problem with all of them is
   that they run static web operations, and what's happening right now requires
   Live Web coverage.  They need RSS feeds, and they need to point to, or
   aggregate, the independent work of citizen journalists.

   A short list of those include:

   Ojai Post http://www.ojaipost.com/,
   Robert Peake http://www.robertpeake.com/,
   OjaiBlog http://www.ojaiblog.com/,
   Bakersfield Californian http://www.bakersfield.com/102,
   Flickr shots tagged 'dayfire' http://flickr.com/photos/tags/dayfire,
   Technorati searches for blogs tagged 'dayfire' http://technorati.com/tags/dayfire,
   Libertatia Lab Reports http://libertatia-labs.blogspot.com/,
   Sounding Circle http://soundingcircle.com/,
   Doc Searls Weblog http://doc.weblogs.com/,
   MaryLu Wehmeier http://technorati.com/faves/dayfirehose?add=http%3A//www.hellomarylu.com/

   and others I don't have time to list now.

   Few of these are news organizations in the usual sense.  Yet all of them are
   in a position to report.  More to the point, all are DIY journalists -- what
   more of us are calling Citizen Journalists (and I call CJs).  In the same
   way as more eyes make bugs shallow, more CJs make more news available.

   We've moved source coding into the open world, and the result is over
   130,000 sources of building material http://sourceforge.net/ for a whole
   new networked civilization.  We have a system now that's pure NEA: nobody
   owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it.

   We need the same for news.

   This morning on my blog I stated my commitment to come up with a "River of
   News" http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews (thank you Dave
   Winer for that metaphor, and the tech to make it start working
   http://www.scripting.com/2006/08/22.html#whatsNewForYourBlackberry3) for
   Day Fire information.  And later, for all live fire news, reported by
   anybody.  A live River of News page displays quickly, easily and without
   layout or graphical complications on your Blackberry, Nokia 770, Treo or
   other handheld Web device.

   Then this afternoon, a few minutes ago, David Sifry
   http://www.sifry.com/alerts/ came through with the first Day Fire News
   River: http://www.sifry.com/dayfire/.  So a big thanks to him too.

   Skoop Nisker used to sign off his newscasts with the line, "If you don't
   like the news, go out and make some of your own".

   Substitute "software" for "news" and you get my point.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
     the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
     a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
     University.
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