When the floods hit the Monadnock Region, people in and around the area were hungry for any news they could get. One man who lives in Keene, Jon Udell, wanted to show that during a crisis, anyone might be able to help fill that information gap. On the web, Udell assembled a guided tour of the flooded portions of Keene and by Monday morning, had posted video and maps.
New Hampshire Public Radio's Jon Greenberg has more.
The first thing to say about Jon Udell is that he is not your average web guy. He's the lead analyst for InfoWorld Magazine, a publication that claims over 170 thousand IT managers as subscribers. The other thing about Udell is that he likes to experiment. So on Sunday, when he hopped on his bike and tooled around Keene with his camcorder, he wanted to show what a citizen journalist might be able to do in the future.
"Pretty much anybody with a camera will be able to gather information and put it up someplace so you'll be able to put together a larger picture."
Go to Udell's web site and you'll find what he calls a screencast of the floods in Keene. It's like a mini documentary that starts with a series of satellite shots that zoom in on Keene, then switch to regular street maps. Udell narrates and as he speaks, a colored line on the map traces where he's gone. The video cuts in to show flooded streets and people in rafts. You hear Udell describing what's going on.
"Down by Damon Court by the Beaver St. Market, the brook was flooded like I've never seen it before. And on Brook St. there were boats evacuating people from their houses, down by the intersection with Spring."
Udell shows all sorts of things, including people trying to see how far their cars can make it through deep puddles. One car stalls in the middle and Udell has close-ups of the passengers laughing, lighting up cigarettes and calling their friends on a cell phone to pull them out.
It might seem frivolous but Udell isn't trying to get the big story. He's content to leave that to the professional journalists. At the same time, he believes that local details add enormously to give the public a well rounded picture of what's going on.
"I have nothing as complete as the record I made of Keene from Alstead. I'm not going to drive up and dodge National Guard trucks to find out but I would like to know. I would like to be able to see much more of what has happened in Alstead. I would like to see much more of what has happened in Hinsdale than I can currently see. And it's entirely possible and in a couple of years I think it will be routine that we will."
But Udell isn't just interested in playing with relatively cheap software that lets anyone put together a home movie. What he loves is the technology today that can tie the subject of a movie to a very precise place. Some of the maps in his screencast from Keene came free, courtesy of Google. Udell can hack into those maps and insert the exact coordinates from a geo-positioning satellite, or GPS. A few months ago, he tested this on a minor curiosity in the Keene cemetery.
"A squirrel had dragged a couple of American flags from a gravestone and woven them into his nest. It was really funny but you had to know exactly where it was and you had to know to look up and I could never could communicate that and here I had this tool where I was able to pinpoint the location of that tree and then I was able to link that location on the Google map screen to still images and even to my camera panning up and looking at the squirrel's nest in the tree."
Udell sees this fusion of GPS, maps, and movies as a new form of storytelling. He says the software is cumbersome today but, as with everything else in high tech, it will only get easier and cheaper. And as more people use it, for subjects as large as a flood and as small as a squirrel's nest, he hopes it will give anyone who's interested a better view of the world.
For NHPR News, I'm Jon Greenberg.
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Kudos to NHPR for interviewing blogging pioneer Jon Udell. I think this posting is of historic significance...especially the link to Jon's video footage of the Keene flood. What we are seeing for the first time is "video on the radio." Media literacy in the 21st century requires understanding of all modes of media...video, audio, text. Its all coming together and Jon's interview exemplifies this change.