Google Maps And Twitter Are Essential Information Resources For California Fires

The immediate threat seems to have passed for my wife and me here in San Diego, as fires ravage Southern California. But it's still essential for us to keep an eye on the situation. The TV news is first-rate for getting an overview. But Google Maps and Twitter provide a running answer to the question that's most important to me and my wife: Is our neighborhood and our house in any immediate danger?

Yesterday, I posted a brief roundup of Internet resources for the Southern California fires. They're all useful links. But I've devoted 98% of my Internet attention to Google Maps and Twitter.

Google Maps helps when I hear the name of a community that's been evacuated, and want to know where it is in relationship to our neighborhood. We've been living in San Diego ten years, and I still don't know where the overwhelming majority of neighborhoods are. How far away are we from Valley Center? Spring Valley? When I hear the name of a community that's been evacuated, I type it into Google Maps and then get driving directions to our house. That gives me a general idea of the straight-line distance between that community and our neighborhood. If driving route is particularly circuitous, Google Maps lets me draw my own route by hand, and keep track of the mileage.

I've located two maps that show the location of the fires, as well as evacuation centers for people and large animals, and the status of those evacuation centers -- whether they're full or still have more capacity. The first map can be reached from the KPBS.org home page.

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Another Google Map of the fires is reachable from the Fire Season 2007: Battling California's Wildfires page, which appears to be published by the office of Gov. Schwarzenegger.

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Like all Google Maps, these are zoomable and pannable, so I can locate our house, center on it, and then zoom in and out to see what's going on in our neighborhood. (If you're curious, we live southwest of Lake Murray, within walking distance of the lake. The nearest evacuated neighborhood is Rancho San Diego, about nine miles away.)

Twitter has been amazingly useful. I've located three Twitter feeds in particular that are great for fire updates. One is published by KPBS News. The other two are published by two San Diego residents named Nate Ritter. and Viss.

Ritter and Viss include the text "#sandiegofire" in each of their tweets about the fire, so you can keep up with what they're doing by just sending a command to twitter to "track #sandiegofire"

I'll update this post later today with information on how to subscribe to fire information over Twitter.

Update 6:30 pm ET: And now the instructions are done; they're here. Also, in the first comment following this post, my friend Jenna Leng posted links to information about the fire in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Twitter's usefulness is an enormously pleasant surprise to me in this emergency. Each message in Twitter is limited to 140 characters. But you can get a lot of information in steady stream of messages that are 140 characters each. Moreover, the enforced brevity requires you to limit your tweets to just the facts, without any "color" or throat-clearing. Consider some recent posts:

Over time in this decade, I've seen the Internet's role evolve in several regional and national emergencies. On 9/11, I shuttled back and forth between the TV in my living room, and my Internet-enabled computer in my home office, getting information from both channels. I marveled that, while phone lines were down and cell phone service was iffy, I could e-mail and IM with friends and family in New York.

Two years later, during the San Diego wildfires, I once again turned to the pair of the TV and Internet. By that time, I'd un-wired the house for Wi-Fi, so I didn't have to shuttle back and forth -- I just sat in the living room with notebook computer on my lap and the news on TV in front of me. We didn't have the Google Maps firemaps that we have today, so my wife and I kept several maps of San Diego County open on the couch between us.

During the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004, bloggers in Bombay spontaneously organized the SEA-EAT blog to coordinate disaster information. Three days later, the blog had 50 contributors and 100,000 visitors. A Sri Lanka man wandered his island nation, sending back tsunami updates over text messaging.

Blogs and Web sites mobilized by the thousands for Katrina relief in 2005, adding a "DONATE NOW" button for the American Red Cross to their site. Apple and Amazon gave their entire front page to donation information -- a donation of very valuable Internet real estate. A self-described "Web Deziner" whose first name happened to be Katrina gave her vanity domain to the cause; that site is still standing.

The Internet nicely complements TV news for information about a disaster. TV news provides the big picture of what's happening throughout the region. The Internet can keep you informed about what the disaster means to you.

How To Sign Up For San Diego Fire News From Twitter

Sign up for a Twitter account from the Twitter home page.

Do you want to receive Twitter updates over text messages on your mobile phone? This is a good idea if you've been evacuated from your home, or for some other reason can't get to an Internet-enabled computer. Go here to active your mobile phone. You can also sign up on the same page to receive and send Twitter messages -- known as "tweets" -- via instant message, over the AIM, GTalk, .Mac, LiveJournal, or Jabber networks.

Go to the kpbsnews Twitter page. and click the big, prominent "Follow" button at the top. The "Follow" button changes to "Following." Click the arrow to the left of the word "Following" to set whether you want to receive updates from KPBS over text messaging to your cell phone.

Do the same for Nate Ritter and Viss.

Alternately, you may want to simply sign up to receive all tweets containing the text #sandiegofire. To do that, send "track #sandiegofire" to Twitter. To stop tracking, send "untrack #sandiegofire". You can do the same for any text string -- set it to "track iphone" or "track facebook" and you'll receive all tweets from anyone containing (respectively) the text "iphone" or "facebook."

The easiest way to receive tweets on your desktop is to simply visit the Twitter home page and log in. There are also several Twitter programs for the desktop. Twitterific is popular on the Mac, and Tweetr and Spaz are cross-platform clients for Windows, the Mac, and Linux, requiring the Adobe AIR runtime.

For more information on Twitter, visit the FAQ, where you can learn about Twitter commands, and how to configure Twitter and your instant-messaging program to send and receive tweets.

Note: If you have more detailed instructions on using Twitter over text messaging and instant message, please post in the comments below. I use Twitter almost exclusively over the Web, at my desk and on the iPhone, so my instructions on text messaging and instant message can probably use some improvement.