RConversation

China quake aid: keep on giving!

Many thanks to the 383 people who signed my pledge to aid China's earthquake victims. While we didn't make my artificial and ambitious goal of 500 people by May 20th, I will give more money anyway, and I hope many other people will keep on giving. Thanks to all who spread the world and Oliver Ding who even made a slideshow.

If you're looking for ways to give:

• While the pledge is now closed many people left suggestions for ways to give in the comments sections, and all those links are still valid.
• Eliot Ng has listed 24+ ways to give.
• Relief.asia is running a fundraising and volunteer effort for Sichuan and Myanmar.
• Alibaba has an excellent page with information about how you can donate to the Red Cross, and where you can send supplies.

Help China's quake victims!

I just donated US$500 to help Chinese earthquake victims. I plan to give more if you also help out.

I've got a bunch of information sources going simultaneously: I switch between the BBC and CNN International, I watch my Google Reader aggregator to see what all my subscribed news sites are reporting and what the bloggers I know In China are saying. QQ is aggregating citizen video reports from the quake zone. The Global Voices China team have been linking to a lot of blogs inside and outside of China who are aggregating quake information. And I've also been keeping an eye on Twitter. There is an extremely active community of people on Twitter trading links in Chinese and English from blogs, mainstream media, official sources, secondhand information from friends and colleagues, first-hand eyewitness experiences etc. etc. Quite a number of journalists seem to be lurking there and using Twitter to find English-speaking eyewitness sources who live in Sichuan. I agree with Kaiser Kuo, Twitter doesn't replace the excellent journalism being done by Chinese journalists, citizens, and international reporters who are on the scene in Sichuan; but it is providing a valuable platform for rapid group discussion and information-trading on the quake - amplified by uber-blogger-twitterers like Robert Scoble. If the Olympic torch protests divided East and West, this disaster is bringing people together again.

Meanwhile, for serious China-wonks out there here's an interesting factoid: Wang Zhenyao, who currently heads disaster relief for China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, used to be in charge of village elections in the Chinese countryside during the 1990s. (See this Washington Post article from 10 years ago: "A Quiet Bureaucrat, Promoting The Vote One Village at a Time")

(And yes.. I'm back online... still recovering from something called an abdominal myomectomy: a pretty major operation to remove a bunch of tumors that had caused so much blood loss and anemia that by late March I was not very functional. I'm still pretty weak, have dizzy/nauseous spells, and get completely exhausted after walking for an hour and can't lift anything heavy, and my doctor wants me to take a full 6 weeks off from work, but I've started working from home and will probably make forays into the office soon.)

South Asia Earthquake: Tsunamibloggers on the case

The bloggers at The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, who rose so heroically to the cause during the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster, are rising once again to bring us information and updates on today's earthquake in Pakistan and India.

Over at Global Voices, Neha Viswanathan also has a good roundup of firsthand earthquake reactions from South Asian bloggers.

SUNDAY UPDATE: Neha has another post on earthquake blogging.  Also note the tsunami bloggers have now formed a new blog: South Asia Quake Help.