Found two interesting posts about how Twitter becomes a real-time news media and how it contributes to spread news all over the World despite telecommunication networks breakdown and/or government censorship.

Smart Mobs author Mark A.M Kramer asks if Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could make humanity morally accountable ? Today, even with a very limited presence of the International community (politics, journalists as well as Aid workers) we continue to receive near real-time information from Myanmar through various multi-plateforms communication media such Twitter, SMS, RSS etc.

Ten days later, in China, an powerful earthquake shook the Sichuan province, information that Technology blogger Robert Scoble claimed that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.

Is Twitter's slogan "What are you doing" should be now replaced by "What's going on" ?

Sources: SmartMobs, BBC

Strange feeling tonight as while I was watching news about current rescue operation in Peru, the earth started to shake and lights to dance for about 10 seconds.

No damage at all, just the everlasting question..do I stay in or do I rush outside. 

Busy week in Philippines, experiencing a typhoon alert last Thursday and a quake 4 days later. 

According GDACS earthquake details are the following:

Magnitude : 6.5
Depth : 10 km
Epicenter : 200 km East of Davao
No Tsunami alert

More

50 days after an earthquake which damaged under sea telecommunication cables, on February 14th Hong Kong office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) reported that Internet access services in the region are back to their fully capacity. 

"The earthquakes which occurred near Taiwan on December 26, 2006, caused serious damage to six submarine cable systems supporting Hong Kong's external telecommunications services. We are pleased to note that the repair of these cable systems is completed and all our external telecommunications services, including Internet access services, have been fully restored. Our Internet service providers have recovered their external connection capacity back to the normal operational level before the earthquakes," an OFTA spokesman said today (February 14).

Sources : OFTA,