Saturday, November 9, 2013

News aggregators- Typhoon Haiyan on Global Flood News

The major story in the news this week is "Stormaggedon" Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines where one of the strongest Pacific Typhoons ever prompted the evacuation of hundreds of thousands and has affected millions. Some photo galleries are at Buzzfeed and the New York Times has some extended coverage. 

For an idea of the scope of the event media event though, the Global Flood News site links to over 56,000 items in the past 3 days, about 90% of which are from twitter. Their front page includes a map with counts of of recent news items related to floods. I've been watching this site for a few months and I can't remember any other stories breaking 10,000 items.    


It's possible to get information at sub-national scales, such as this zoom in to the affected region:


The website also allows you to subscribe to alerts for your area.