Bloggers have been busy covering the enormous wildfires that have been destroying homes in Southern California. The number of posts have soared over the past few days. This pattern is typical of disasters and other breaking news events. You can see a chart on the right from Technorati that shows the increase in the number of blog posts. This chart shows the number of posts when Technorati is searched for the phrase “california fires.” There will be many more posts once evacuees are able to return home and blog about their experience like this blogger did. We already know that at least 1,500 homes have been lost — hopefully the final tally won’t be much higher than that. The good news is that the Santa Ana winds are fading and fire crews are finally starting to make some progress in their tough battle against the fires. Here’s another roundup of blogosphere fire coverage. You can find our previous posts about the fires here. L.A. Times Breaking News Blog says San Diego officials were upbeat during a press conference yesterday afternoon about the city returning to normal soon. “The vast majority of San Diego is open for repopulation,” said Mayor Jerry Sanders. The weather report is also encouraging. The Wall Street Journal has launched a blog about the wildfires. Coverage so far includes the arson probe by the FBI; homeowner insurance worries and the reverse 911 system. Videos: Helicopter dumps water on Lake Arrowhead fire; California resident films the Witch Fire, apartment complex burns in Rancho Bernardo and Reporter Larry Himmel reports in front of his burning home. Odd Times Signatures tells the mainstream media to stop comparing this disaster to Hurricane Katrina. LAist: Fire evacuees are not refugees. CNN anchor Glenn Beck is the man who labeled Californians losing homes as America haters. Now he is back to explain how the fires started. If you guessed that Glenn Beck blamed the Californians you guessed correctly. They are fighting over there but we need them over here – are there enough National Guard troops here in the U.S. for emergencies? New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson thinks there are not enough here because of the Iraq War: “Today, as the fires rage, California has National Guard men, women, and critical equipment thousands of miles away in Iraq. They need to come home. We need them here.” A post on The Seminal has more about the availability of the National Guard to respond to disasters. Even Former FEMA chief Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown doesn’t think we have enough responders. The California wildfires have set a record for video uploads at CNN’s i-Report. World of Good (WOG) -> People helping fire victims in San Diego. Firedoglake lists other resources for those who want to help out. Pet Connection lists ways you can help both people and animals. SignonSanDiego has launched a Help San Diego blog. Why did the fires start and why did the fires become so intense and so large? Yes, the blaming has started. Theories for fire causes include arson, downed electrical lines, shrubs, overbuilding, global warming, Al Qaeda and even Satan. Note: some of the blogs bringing up an Al Qaeda link – like this blog – are using a news story from 2003. Global Warming: Climate change has been brought up as possibly making the fires larger and more extreme than they would be under normal conditions. Some on the right are arguing against this theory (see here, here, here, here, here and here) but scientists have been talking about megafires fueled by warming temperatures. The Booman Tribune also brings up the recent terrible fires that occured in Greece which may also have a climate change link. RealClimate offers a more detailed look at the Mediterranean Heat. Let’s also not forget that it was just last year that there was an unprecidented heat wave in California that was also possibly climate change related. More on the fires and climate change link here, here and here. Another blame item has been to blame the environmentalists. The Sierra Club responsed to these allegations by issuing a statement. Smoke creates a health risk for Southern California residents. Big tech companies including Qualcomm and Sony Electronics closed down their offices because of the wildfires – primarily because their employees’ homes were threatened. Compiler blogs about how you can use TwitterWhere? to track tweets by location. In this case you could enter locations near the fires to see if anyone is tweeting about them on Twitter. The Huffington Post reports that losses have topped the $1 billion mark in Southern California. Things are not good for some of the birds in Southern California either. CBR blogged about how the fires are impacting the comics industry (via Newsarama). The Disney Blog reports that Disney is donating $2 million to help fire victims. U-Haul is also helping by offering evacuees 30 days of free storage. Smoke and ash are obscuring the view in Long Beach. No! The WSJ blog also says the avocado crop has been damaged by the fire. Gearlog has a roundup about ways technology can help with disaster response and fire tracking. Are the California fires the first web 2.0 disaster – or the first Web 2.0 coverage of a disaster? (via Mathew Ingram). The answer is both yes and no but way more yes than no. A good example is just to look back at our archived coverage in 2005 of Hurricane Katrina. There were lots of blogs back then covering the hurricanes – some of them were weather blogs that had already been following the tropical system before it organized and became Hurricane Katrina. Once the story was really big the MSM even started launching some Hurricane Katrina blogs. However, there was nothing like the embeddable Google Maps that bloggers can easily plug into their posts like we now have available. There were also not nearly as many videos available in 2005 and there were no embeddable videos from sites like YouTube. Also missing in 2005 was Twitter. Posted in California Fires Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Some Restaurants Embrace Bloggers While Others Fear the Snark
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article last week about food bloggers and social sites like Yelp.com where people can post reviews of restaurants and local business. The WSJ said some restaurants were feeding bloggers for free. Some restaurant owners also took matters into their own hands and simply wrote positive reviews of their own restaurants under fake names. As online food sites become increasingly influential in the restaurant business, chefs and owners are plying bloggers with free meals to get good write-ups. Some are also posting favorable reviews about themselves on popular Web sites or becoming Internet scribes. Among those using the tactics are some of the biggest names in the business. Terrance Brennan, co-owner and chef of New York’s Artisanal Bistro and Picholine, hosted a cheese class for bloggers last year, waiving the usual $75-a-person fee. Bill Telepan, chef and co-owner of Telepan in New York, donated a $200, four-course meal to one influential blogger’s online contest. And in Washington, the Park Hyatt’s Blue Duck Tavern says it invited a customer back for a free Father’s Day meal after she posted a negative comment on the Washington Post’s Web site. (In a follow-up post, the diner wrote, “We will definitely return to Blue Duck Tavern,” not mentioning that she had been invited free.) Chefs at some restaurants are finding it beneficial to have bloggers give feedback on dishes. Chefs say there’s another upside to getting chummy with bloggers: advice on improving the food. In San Francisco, Chef Robbie Lewis of Bacar restaurant says he considers Ms. Gagliardi, of Tablehopper, “a friend” at this point. After hosting her at a “friends and family dinner” — a meal to try out new dishes on close associates about a month after starting as the executive chef at the restaurant — Mr. Lewis took her advice. He changed the way he plated a roasted baby leek dish, so it was easier for diners to get a taste of poached egg and sauce with each bite. “I can’t get feedback from other critics before publication,” says Mr. Lewis. Ms. Gagliardi didn’t write a subsequent review, but frequently mentions events at Bacar on her site. It’s relatively easy for restaurants to ingratiate themselves to key food bloggers. Publicists across the industry say they now include bloggers and food Web site forum hosts on their media lists, and regularly invite them to opening parties, free meals and other events. What helps some restaurants may be too much for smaller establishments and cafes to handle. Screenwerk blogs that a cafe in Oakland, California called Rooz Cafe does not appreciate “Yelpers” – reviewers from the Yelp.com website and has posted a sign that says “No Yelpers.” What I was told, in a nutshell, is that the caf? staff has encountered a stream of would-be critics “with attitude,” predisposed to take issue with or be critical of the business. Whether or not this is a correct perception, there are many more outlets (Yelp being only one) for customers and consumers to voice opinions about businesses on the Internet. And there’s little most of these businesses can do about it, for better or for worse. The staff said to me rhetorically, “If you’ve got a problem with something, you should tell us first rather than going online and posting.” They also expressed the view that amateur reviewers, in this case from Yelp, were not making distinctions between local coffee houses and large corporate outlets like Starbucks. They were, the cafe staff argued, being “snarky” for entertainment reasons or to impress the Yelp community but not being respectful or mindful of the potential impact their reviews might have on a small businesses. The reviews for Rooz can be found here and they seem to only be increasing thanks to the “No Yelpers” sign. There’s even a couple Soup Nazi references in there. The cafe actually has four out of five stars after 226 reviews. That’s pretty good but it’s those isolated snarky ones Rooz doesn’t like. Posted in Food Blogs Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

YouTube’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades
YouTube.com is considering some changes and they have a preview of a redesigned website you can view. The navigation changes seem useful but the site is a little on the bright side. Download Squad is warning its readers to have their sunglasses ready before viewing the redesign. YouTube’s blog post about the preview says there will be a number over large changes over the next three months. In a constant effort to improve the user experience and incorporate your feedback we’ll be making a number of large changes to the site over the next few months. In addition to making improvements upon existing features, we’ll be rolling out some brand new items that are still in the works. We can tell you there is a lot to look forward to, but in the meantime we offer you this sneak preview of the new YouTube video browsing page (our “Videos” tab) and invite you to share your feedback with us. — Categories will now be found under the “Videos” tab. — Dropdown menus make for a smoother transition when clicking through popular pages, ie. “Most Viewed,” “Top Favorites,” “Recently Featured,” etc. — Tabs and video browsing pages have a new overall look and feel. YouTube has also merged the videos and category links but you can still make all the same popularity searches as before. It would be helpful if they would include a few more categories since there are so many videos on YouTube now. Until there are more categories you can always run a search for tags using this search string and changing KEYWORD to the tag you want to use: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=KEYWORD&search=tag Use Halloween as the keyword and you get videos tagged Halloween. They seem very eager for feedback at YouTube and they are requesting feedback on the right hand side of the preview page. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Friday is the Best Day to Read Blogs
We blogged recently about the Carnegie Mellon Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks study that found the 100 most informative blogs. Another interesting tidbit from this Carnegie Mellon study is that the researchers discovered that the very best day to read blogs – if efficiency is your goal – is Friday. Our framework also allows fractional selection of blogs, which means that instead of reading a large blog every day, we can read it, e.g., only one day per week. This also allows us to ask: what is the best day of the week to read blogs? In order to study whether fractional selection allows to achieve better benefit cost ratio, we split the blogs which had at least one post per day into 7 blogs, one for each day of the week. Fig. 7(a) shows, that by splitting big blogs, the population affected (PA) objective function increases for 12% over the setting where only whole blogs can be selected. Returning to the original question, we performed the following experiment: given a budget of 1000 posts, what is the best day of the week to read posts (optimizing PA)? We found that Friday is the best day to read blogs. The value of PA for Friday is 0.20, while it is 0.13 for the rest of the week. We consider this surprising, since the activity of the blogosphere (number of posts and links created) drops towards the end of the week, and especially over the weekend. You can read the entire paper in these two PDF files: here and here. The logic here might be that bloggers tend to blog less often on Fridays and so what they do end up posting might be more focused and more informative about what is going on in the blogosphere than what you see during the rest of week. That is providing they aren’t Friday Cat Blogging or blogging about their weekend plans. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

80 Pocket Hanging Jewelry Organizer – (White)
80 Pocket Hanging jewelry Organizer – (White) For keeping your jewelry out-of-sight, but not quite out-of-reach or even just for clearing off the top of your dresser, try this 80 Pocket jewelry Organizer that features 40 vinyl pocket on either side for easy identification and convenient storage. Customer Review: Great organizer This jewelry organizer [...]

MySpace Wants Third Party Widgets
MySpace isn’t going to let Facebook have all the fun. The BBC reports that MySpace is also going to be opening up their social network to third-party apps. The move brings the website into line with rival Facebook, which has seen strong growth since it opened up to outside programmers. Facebook has become a portal for services such as video, audio and photos since the change. MySpace has more than 188 million registered users, compared to the 47 million who use Facebook. MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580m in 2005. “We hoped it would do very well, but we never imagined it would do this well,” Mr Murdoch told the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. Third party applications can be built really fast and they can take off very quickly. It was only a few months ago – May of this year – that Facebook opened up its social network to third party apps. Just a month or so after that MySpace was reported to be jealous of Facebook’s apps. Wired’s Compiler blog says the platform will be opened in the next couple of months. MySpace has nearly four times the amount of users as Facebook so Facebook’s several month head start in the widget wars probably isn’t much of a lead at all. Posted in Social Networks Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Eyes Have It
Eyes Have It Customer Review: The Eyes REALLY DO Have It! This video is terrific. It is not outdated. Trends always come back around! These are Donna’s tips and secrets to a beautiful look. Buy it! You won’t be sorry. – Table Lamp (One-Piece) Table Lamp (One-Piece) – These [...]

Southern California Wildfire Resources
This post contains a list of resource about the wildfires in Southern California. More coverage can be found in our 2007 California Wildfires section. Blogs: L.A. Times Breaking News Blog | California Fire News | LAFD Blog | LAist | SB Fire and Wind Blog | SignOnSanDiego Fireblog | Cat Dirt Sez | Adam Housley (Fox) | Calitics Maps: Google Mashup | San Diego Fires Google Mashup | GeoMac | Map.sdsu.edu | MODIS | NOAA Goes 11 | Witch Fire Map (PDF) | Live.com Bird’s Eye Malibu Map | Air Quality Maps Newspapers: LATimes.com | L.A. Daily News | OC Register | Press Enterprise | San Diego Union-Tribune | The Sun News Search: Google News | Technorati | Topix Pet Resources: ASPCA | Human Society | VCA phone numbers Photos: Flickr | latimes.com | BBC | CBS2 | CNN | KNBC Viewer Photos | Yahoo | Fox News | NASA Radio/TV News: CBS2.com | KNBC | MyFox Los Angeles | NBC San Diego | 10News.com | KUSI | ABC7.com | CBS8 | KTLA Twitter: @LAPD | Kpbsnews | @nateritter | @viss | @auer1816 | @latimesfires | @bloggersblog | Twitterverse Videos: YouTube | CBS2 Websites: Wikipedia | California Fire Website | Battling California’s Wildfires | City of San Diego Fire Alert site | Yahoo Full Coverage | San Diego Country Emergency Homepage | Red Cross Safe and Well List | L.A. County Weather: Fire Warnings | Los Angeles Weather.com | Los Angeles Weather Underground | San Diego Weather.com | San Diego Weather Underground | Air Quality Maps Wildfire Information: National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) | Wildfire links | Drought Monitor for California | Santa Ana Winds | Mega-fires More Resource Lists: Jim 2.0’s San Diego Fire Resources | DailyKos Emergency Links Figures: Acres Burned: 300,000+ acres | Evacuated: 500,000+ | Deaths: 2 | Injuries: 42 | Homes destroyed: 1,300+ View Larger Map Last Update: 10-23-07 4:35 PM EST Posted in 2007 California Wildfires Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Fashion Pixiez
fashion Pixiez Customer Review: Wonderfully Girlie! fashion Pixiez was a very entertaining movie for my six year old daughter. The movie has lots of scenes that she could relate to. It is very age appropriate. The entire Bratz Dolls collection is awesome! – The I Love Lucy Collection – Job Switching/fashion Show Customer [...]

Bloggers Cover the 2007 California Wildifres
Wildfires are continuing to burn out of control in Southern California. You can see a list of resources about the wildfires here. Hundreds of thousands have been evacuated from their homes and at least 750 homes have been destoryed. The fires are fueled by unusually powerful Santa Ana winds and an ongoing drought in the region. Here is some coverage of the fires from the blogosphere. L.A. Times Breaking News Blog says the Witch Fire is halway to the ocean. Resident in the Green Valley Park area was stuck in her car with her pets. Thousands of evacuees are staying at Qualcomm Stadium: “5,000 and perhaps as many as 10,000 people are at the stadium” Global warming is fueling mega-fires. Mashable has a post on the Twittering of disasters. Wired does too. More Twitter links in the resources post. A thread on Calitics contains a list of phone numbers to call for information. Lost Remote’s post includes links to some Live video streams. Glenn Beck labels California homeowners as America haters. Discussion of Glenn Beck’s strange and insensitive comment continues here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. More blog posts about Glenn Beck’s comments in the previouis entry. The O.C. Source: “Heavy smoke hangs like a pall over much of central Orange County and a fiery red glow pierces through the night skies, as the Santiago Fire continues to consume everything in its path.” Queen of Spain blogs about the important of virtual neighbors and that her “house didn’t burn down yet.” Truthdig notes the worldwide interest in the fires. The Disphan Chronicles compares it to the Cedar Fire in 2003. Larry Himmel – CBS8 San Diego’s neighborhood guy — reports from the scene of his own home which burned down. Rick Rockhill has an interesting post about his personal experience leaving San Diego county. Success in Life and Money offers a tribute to the firefighters battling the flames: “We so appreciate their hard work and all the firemen that have come from all around to help out! You guys are all so amazing and we all thank you so much for protecting us!” TMZ reported a fire at the LG House Malibu, which was home to some Hollywood parties over the summer. Jim 2.0 has compiled a great list of San Diego Fire resources. Girl’s Gone Child: “Because no matter what may burn in the fire, there are some things impenetrable. Indestructible. And those are the things that matter most of all– and the only things really worth protecting.” Chris Messing blogs about the use of Twitter hashtags. (via Doc Searls) Dr. Steve Forbes at the Weather Channel provides a detailed look at the Santa Ana winds and other forces fueling the wildfires. Mobile Messaging 2.0 blogs about the reverse 911 calls that were made to notify homeowners about the urgent need to evacuate. (via GIS Sites) Posted in California Fires Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 12:35 am and is filed under Celebrity News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.