Phone texting & disaster relief

As popular a leisure activity phone texting is in Europe and Asia (and increasingly among teens in the US), it has become an important tool in dealing with natural disasters. "The messages can get through [and did in the tsunami's aftermath in Asia last week] even when the cell phone signal is too weak to sustain a spoken conversation," the BBC reports. And SMS (for "short message service" or phone-texting) networks can handle a lot more traffic than cell-phone or land-line networks, it adds. Plus, even where there's no Internet cafe and land lines are down, there's almost always someone who has a mobile phone to get word out (or in). The BBC tells the story of Sanjaya Senanayake with Sri Lankan TV (also a blogger). "He was one of the first on the scene after the tsunami destroyed much of the Sri Lankan coast. Cell phone signals were weak. Land lines were unreliable. So Mr Senanayake started sending out text messages. The messages were not just the latest news they were also an on-the-ground assessment of 'who needs what and where'." Read the BBC piece to see how Sanjaya and Dan Lane, "a text message guru" in the UK are creating the "Alert Retrieval Cache," a system to "link those in need with those who can help." [This is a little off topic for Net Family News, but age isn't an issue, here - your child could well be the next Sanjaya Senanyake or Dan Lane (next week, not necessarily when s/he's grownup, certainly!).]