Here’s a map that’s tracking evacuation centers and updates related to Hurricane Gustav:

Hurricane tracking map widget
via Lockergnome.com’s
Inside WeatherBug Blog.

With natural disasters in the past, I have pointed to ways in which volunteers, individuals, aid organizations and the media have utilized the web to help communicate and coordinate their responses. As I’ve said before, my interest in this began with having family in costal regions in Florida and Alabama — along with my involvement with blogging and other collaborative “social” media. I’ve seen a lot of efforts in the past, but little pre-planning or coordination.

Already, groups are forming who are eager to utilize their past experience and the web-resources available. While I hope that competition will not lead to duplicative efforts, that’s one of the things that happens in these situations. Rather than worry about it, I recommend that everyone cooperate when they can — or do their own things when they can’t — just get over any urges that my crop up that your are competing and liberally link to each-other and mirror any information that is displayed anywhere. (Later: I’ve updated some information to correspond with name and link changes.)

In that vein, rather than collect any links here, I’m pointing elsewhere:

The Interdictr.com Wiki: (Needs a name change, quickly, however.)GustavWiki.com: From the community that sprung up around the Katrina weblog the intedictor (that at the time, I said changed my entire opinion of the Live Journal platform), a new website at the URL interdictr.com has evolved. The group has just set up a wiki (http://gustavwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page) to collect and share information about the storm. (The new wiki is based on the Katrina Help wiki.)

Wikipedia: As typical, Wikipedia’s best and worst is on display in a situation like this. If you click there, you’ll likely find a comprehensive collection of Gustav-related information. However, I just clicked there and for a few seconds, discovered some vandalism. As the day progresses, I predict some measures will be taken to raise the bar on who can make changes to the page.

The Gustav Information Center (Gustav08.ning.com): Springing up from some industrious volunteers is a site called the Gustav Informaion Center who are using the Ning platform. They, too, are pulling together content from most of the user-contributed corners of the Internet (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.).

I’ll add that two newspapers along the likely affected coastal area that have previously displayed savvy, even Pulitzer-prize-winning use of new media are the Mobile Press Register and, most notably, the New Orleans Times Picayune.

Already, the Times-Picauyune (NOLA.com) is the center of coverage for the New Orleans area. And in the Mobile area, AL.com/hurricane is tracking the news using approaches they’ve learned in previous hurricanes. (Sidenote: the Mobile and New Orleans papers are both owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, et al)

For more links, check with any of the linked sites above.

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