Hurricane Katrina and the Influence of Blogs

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina is unbelievable. It's so awful I can't even watch the news.

I was surprised to see a link to Miles O'Brien's hurricane blog on CNN.com. I knew blogs could be influential, but I didn't realize news services now had them.

Speaking of the Blogosphere influence, it appears that today bloggers shamed Amazon and Yahoo! into hosting links to Red Cross Hurricane Relief Fund. How? By encouraging blog readers to bombard these sites (and Google, which still does not have a Hurricane Relief Fund link on its main page) with phone calls and e-mail. The argument was that these sites supported Tsunami relief after the Dec. 26, 2004 disaster, but were not doing the same thing to aid their own country now.

Apparently it worked.