Tsunami relief: Contributor help on the Web

"In a disaster on a scale rarely experienced on planet Earth, it is perhaps appropriate that there are so many ways to use the most global of media - the Internet - to help the hundreds of thousands injured in the south Asian tsunamis and the millions suddenly plunged into homelessness," writes SafeKids.com's Larry Magid on his page linking to Web pages for donating funds and goods to support the tsunami relief effort and pages to get information on various charities. There are similar links at USAID, National Public Radio, the BBC, and the New York Times. This article at TurkishPress.com offers insights into what's being done on the ground in southern India. Though one would think the very last thing of critical need is technology, I was grateful to read in this piece how tech aid from the US came to the rescue at the central relief center in Nagapattinam, the "worst hit" city in Tamil Nadu State. "To bring some order to the relief effort, a US-based technology company rushed a team of experts to Nagapattinam to install a management information system" to get critical data daily to all the relief centers. "The system will use police radio sets to gather calls for aid and log it onto software for tracking purposes to set priorities and respond with supplies to the most needed sites quicker." For the bigger picture, here's a roundup of reports from BBC correspondents in affected areas all over the tsunami region.