Hurricane Katrina: Managing The Information Flow

First, a thank you to Robert Scoble, Nancy White, Jon Lebovsky, Julie Leung,   and others who helped get this conversation started. (8:18 am: Terry Heaton, I didn't mean to leave you out.)  I also want to point you to a couple of other resources -- my OPML blog with Katrina links and a new wiki at OJR tracking coverage, missing persons connection efforts and resources. Please stop by the wiki and contribute any links you think should be included or leave them here and I'll do it.

If anyone can figure out how to convert the wiki to an OPML file as it's updated please let me know. (Dave Winer, thanks for putting out the word.) David Newberger, I've added some resources to the wiki that might help in your efforts to build a Google map database.

Now for the hard part. More and more information is popping up on line and I don't think collecting links is enough. Just to narrow it down to one area, very specifically, can anyone help figure out how to aggregate all of the personal status reports (missing/safe/lost/found, etc.) into one searchable database or other searchable format? Ideally, we'd be able to do the same by zip code, neighborhood, parish and other formations but if we could just accomplish an aggregated people finder that would be a huge accomplishment.

In the very short term, maybe a badge for sites with personal status reports would help or some kind of web ring/network that links them all together.

Related: Hurricane Katrina: What Can We Do? Hurricane Katrina: Grasping the Concept