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I’d like to introduce someone: Ike Pigott. He’s a local blogger that I ran across on Twitter some time ago. I’ve been following his blog, Occam’s RazR, for a while now. He works for Red Cross and has an extensive background in communications.

He’s recently set himself upon a personal quest to utilize the online tools and social media for disaster relief and aid. He’s created the Red Cross Online Disaster Portal and opened the Red Cross Twitter Channel.

The idea is that people in evacuation zones could “follow” the Red Cross Twitter feed from their cell phones, and find out about shelter locations and service delivery sites.

I think it’s a great idea, and I’m personally excited to be able to see first-hand the mediums that we have available to us today being put to use for such a great cause. This will be especially handy for us locally with hurricane season coming up, as well as tornado season!

If you are interested in helping out or would like more information, please contact Ike. I’m sure that he’d love to hear from you and could use any and all help sent his way!

Mama always said, “Keep your words soft and sweet, in case you’ll have to eat them later.” I guess this isn’t exactly what she had in mind, but it’s possible that a recent Twitter glitch made lead to some eating their words, or having words of their own.

Twitter glitch leaves ‘private’ users exposed to the world

“Twitter, the popular messaging site which has gained traction among the Technorati, has come in for plenty of criticism for downtime, bugs and trouble keeping up with the volume of users signing up.

But its latest problem takes things beyond the merely irritating and into the realm of dangerous – by undermining user privacy.”

(via The Guardian)

Due to some unforeseen quirk of the Twitter API, certain things that are protected within the virtual walls of the Twitter.com realm were available for the whole world to see via Twittervision, regardless of the user’s selected privacy preferences. That means that whatever someone was twittering away privately was actually visible to the whole freakin’ world!

A few hours ago the hole was plugged, but what most users may not have realized yet is that since it was obviously open for a good long while, those tweets may linger on via the many available search engine cache sites.

*ahem* Google, anyone?