Keeping in the disaster track for another day, an article about using the Wikipedia as a way of communicating information about Avian Flu as a means of keeping people informed before an outbreak occurs: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Getting Smart About Disasters: In the days and weeks following, questions of how best to identify, communicate and report on the possibility of disaster consumed many weblogs and media outlets. What tools could be used to make sure that a tragedy of this magnitude could not happen again?

The tsunami wasn't an instantaneous disaster, many people were killed or injured hours after the initial event. There were two problems: how do you tell people that there's a 10 metre wave approaching, and what are they actually supposed to do?

The most important tool we have, of course, is information. Knowing what to do before disaster strikes makes smart responses far simpler, as can having access to good information once a crisis is underway.

What I find interesting in this use of Wikipedia is the rise of informal, collaborative information systems as the authoritative source of information about subjects. There are blogs which are the authoritative source of information about given topics, usually maintained by a few individuals if not simply a single person. They obsess about the topic, covering a variety of angles.

The professional media will claim that informal, amateur sites like these are not objective or thorough, that they don't present “both sides” of a dialogue (as if there are always only two sides to a problem).

But these sites are authoritative. They're linked to as the authoritative site, they turn up in the top ten on search sites, and in the case of sites like Wikipedia, corrected or normalized to an attempt at a neutral point of view.

The professional media is losing relevancy because content is short, trite, repetitive, and transitory.

News articles are tied to their publication times...they appear briefly then slip away into password protected, sometimes pay-for-access, archives. Some news sites even just delete old content.

Some time in 1995, maybe 1996, my boss at IBM had a notion of domains of information. I'm thinking it was 1995, because otherwise a professional would have created this graphic: rather than myself using MS Paint.

Anyway...the intent was that we (IBM) should create various portals of information around topics to draw people in, then you tout the various IBM products and services available related to the content of the portal, but as a supplement to the content not as the content. I don't recall it being rejected out of hand and for a brief time there were such portals, but in the end the marketing and sales side of the house won out. And that's the general problem for business & professional media sites: they can't see a direct line between providing the information “for free”. Although the usual goal of their presence on the web is to draw readers to their site to take some sort of action (be it order a product, download something, or click on an ad), they keep trying to draw readers using pre-web methods, ignoring (still) the benefit of seeding good content into search engines and letting it act as a draw into the rest of your site.

Getting good information from others presumes that other people have access to good information.

How do you tell when information is good? Number of citations (inbound links)? Comments from users? Unless you've been reading an information source for awhile (an indeterminate amount of time greater than a few minutes and less than a decade), how do you get to know and its reputation for value, utility, and authority?.

Via Boingboing