FCW Insider: Social networking helped tame Gustav

With the FCW Insider entering a new era, you might think the previous Insider’s fondness for Web 2.0 tools and social networking would fade from the site.

You would be wrong.

We’re fascinated to learn that part of the response to Hurricane Gustav was a social networking site that sprang up on Ning.com, where people in the path of the storm – which came ashore in Louisiana earlier this week – traded information and ideas using Twitter, short message service messages for people already away from Internet connections and maps showing the storm’s track, the location of emergency shelters and other critical information.

The site sprang up on its own -- no agency put it together or managed it. It was just people trying to look out for one another, using an array of tools that they did not have only a few years ago.

This is a bright new world.