Emergency Emergency - social networking in action

Not really travel-related at all, but certainly worth a mention.

Story on the BBC talks about a social networking idea from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, where the all the 911.gov sites across the US will be incorporated and "citizens could leave text, video and photos on the site of emergencies, natural disasters and terror attacks".

More here (PDF).

Fascinating idea. It builds on a Web 2.0-style project for the people of Chicago, known as ChicagoCrime.org, which uses a Googe Maps mash-up to plot crime rates across the city.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution