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Social media tries to help during tornadoes, but was the message being heard?

Molly Wood Apr 29, 2011
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Social media tries to help during tornadoes, but was the message being heard?

Molly Wood Apr 29, 2011
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Alabama looks to have been the hardest hit during these storms. Broadband Internet access and adoption in Alabama is below the national average. And in this case, that meant residents there missing out on a bunch of valuable information. The Weather Channel has a breaking news Twitter feed with up-to-the-second data on where storms were heading and where they were touching down. TV stations were posting radar feeds of weather patterns on UStream. Updates on where to go for help were being passed around online.

The situation pointed out just how valuable the Internet can be in the event of an emergency such as this. But there’s a real disparity if people can’t get online and access that information. Getting a chance to go online and goof around on YouTube is one thing, but when it comes down to some people having access to life saving information and some people not, that’s something else altogether.

We talk to Steve Chiotakis, one of the hosts of our sister program, Marketplace Morning Report. He’s in Alabama. Steve tells us about all he was able to learn through social media as events unfolded.

We also speak with Blair Levin. He’s with the Aspen Institute now but he was also one of the architects of President Obama’s National Broadband Initiative.

And we talk with Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information
and Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. He says there are economic reasons why the South doesn’t have higher broadband usage rates and there are also reasons related to there being more rural areas there.

Also in this program, Google’s new browser has voice recognition built in. The extinction of the traditional keyboard has been predicted — falsely — before, but will this finally make it go the way of the dodo?

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