Social network for those seeking, sharing hurricane info

NPR's Andy Carvin describes the social networking applications powering the Hurricane Information Center, which launched last weekend in anticipation of Gustav's landfall and broadened in scope as a community-powered forum for information and user-generated content about Hanna and other storms of the 2008 hurricane season. The site is built by some 500 volunteers who have the technology skills to pull together an "amazing array of tools and resources that can be useful to the public in times of crisis," Carvin tells Poynter Online columnist Al Tompkins. "With this volunteer effort, people are coming out of the woodwork to drop everything and work on hurricane-related mashups, collect information for our wiki, develop text-messaging interfaces, etc." Carvin put out a call for volunteers with this blog post and is posting project updates on this twitter feed.