Donna has been cutting my hair since 1984.
Blane Mays.
My brother is now in Northern Sumatra and heads to Aceh on Wednesday. He reports:
“The death toll is greatly underestimated by CNN and other news organizations because hundred of thousands of bodies are under rubble. The figure is closer to 300,000 dead. Please pray for me and the other workers who are trying to bring comfort and hope to the survivors.”
“Please pray for these first teams who will be helping remove bodies that are badly decomposed; that our community development foundation will be able to quickly install clean water units; that the cease fire will hold between Acehnese rebels and the govt. Also, our teams will not be taken hostage or caught in crossfire.”
Roger that.
Clear Channel’s Internet plan
“Radio analysts say Clear Channel, along with other broadcast radio stations, is being pushed online and toward new technologies by a fragmentation of its own market and by growing competition from satellite radio. Mix the power of Internet radio with those new delivery tools, and terrestrial radio begins to look increasingly fragile, unless it’s online too, some observers worry.” — CNET
New news network?
“As the network anchors drummed their manicured fingers, waiting for correspondents to parachute into position, the sketchy wire reports were supplanted by real-life, as-it-was-happening stories by bloggers who penned moving first-person accounts. This is as real-time as news can get. Weblogs, which started out as online diaries, have morphed into reporters’ notebooks. The information is raw — and perhaps unpolished when compared with news from more established outlets — but it is nonetheless news.”
— Article at Business 2.0
Blog explosion.
Jeff Jarvis summarizes some amazing stats on the growth of blogs, from the latest Pew Internet and American Life study:
* 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people.
* 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers.
The same study reports only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term blog means. That 62% is in daily contact with me.