Sunday, May 18, 2008

Connecting Through Common Technology Connecting Through Common Humanity

This weblog uses FeedBurner the same way naturalists use radio tracking devises on animals, to see where it goes and what it runs into.

Recently somebody, from Taipei evidence suggests, looked up diigo on their version of Google. For whatever reason, my recent post Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human post showed up on the third page of the search and seems to have resulted in a visit.

What was more interesting was that on the first page of the Google search was a hit from the diigo blog China Earthquake ~ A picture is worth a thousand words. This struck me as being a very human story and one rather well suited for the World Wide Web. The "news" from China provides numbers that are incomprehensible. The degree of tragedy would be hard for anyone to fully express but there are also small miracles to be found. Finding these miracles is part of writing the stories of being human. The change is now we are doing it with computers rather than cave walls.

Another post from the diigo blog provided some more factual information.

Diigo’s development temporarily interrupted by the 7.9 magnitude earthquake.

On Monday, May 12, at 2:28pm Beijing time (6:28 GMT), a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, jolted southwestern China’s Sichuan Province. To give some perspective on how severe 7.9 magnitude is on the Richter scale: according to wikipedia, it’s equivalent to 600 megatons of TNT explosive, or energy released by the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption! Mother Earth has lot of unsettling energy!