Typhoon Tweeting

As Im sure many of you are aware, there is a massive storm currently devastating southeast Asia, particularly in the Philippines. Naturally, as we saw in the Arab Spring riots and now ever-increasingly in other parts of the world, Filipinos are taking to social media to document whats going on, share information, and to find missing people and ask for help.

Digging through the explosion of information coming out of the region since the storm hit (which, by the way, if it was a hurricane would be a Category 6, Hurricane Sandy was a Category 3...) is a problem because of all the noise that re-posting/re-tweeting causes.

The good news is that there is a swiss-born man using social mapping to filter out this noise and be able to get quality information to the right people at the right time, "using a combination of volunteers and algorithms to filter the chaos and to provide rescue teams with a detailed, data-driven map of what they should be doing, and where."

Thankfully social media still provides an outlet for disastrous events such as this one, and aren't only being used to find out what Miley Cyrus's Halloween costume is.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303309504579187532520552914