Xeni Jardin:
Strangely, amid massive loss of human life, there seems to be little or no dead wild animals in Sri Lanka. Snip:

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned — the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast, but they can’t find any dead animals.

Link
…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:

John Schwartz wrote an insightful piece for the New York Times this week about the role blogs play in covering and responding to the tsunami disaster. I was interviewed for the piece, but the people who really have something interesting and valuable to say are the ones over there, on the ground — and the folks rolling up their geek sleeves to assist.

From relaying first-person accounts (like Sanjay/Morquendi’s SMS reports in Sri Lanka), to kick-starting relief efforts (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com…, and the Post-Tsunami Reconnect project), to questioning media coverage (Ethan Zuckerman’s post about Myanmar), there’s a lot going on here The amateur-shot image shown here ran in the NYT story. Snip:

“At sumankumar.com…, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: ‘Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites was in Southeast Asia on a break from reporting duties when the tsunami disaster took place. He’s now in Thailand, reporting — and back on the blog again, dispatching photos and first-person accounts. Snip:

One-hundred and fifty-nine pine coffins have been stacked in the garage — many of them big enough to hold refrigerators — built to accommodate the now bloated and rapidly decomposing bodies inside.

Thai soldiers, wearing surgical masks, race against time to arrest the process — before the bodies become impossible to identify.

In a well-choreographed drill — they use hammers to smash square blocks of dry ice, carrying the shards on sheets of plastic and dumping them inside the coffins with the remains. They work at a very high tempo — almost as if they were trying to rescue the living — rather than preserve the dead.

On the sides of the coffins are photographs of the deceased as they were found, special attention paid to jewelry or tattoos, anything that can help in identifying who they once were.

The pictures are grisly — bruised, blackened, bodies misshapen from the ferocious force of an angry ocean and all that travels with it. Old, young, small, large, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, English, Thais �- all victims of the earth’s unrest on a day when she seemed to have precious little mercy.

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
Waxy.org… has been collecting amateur video footage, here’s a roundup post: Link. Punditguy has more: Link

Chris Holland says,

I’ve used prodigem to create torrents for the South Asia tsunami videos. The more people use this torrent, the faster everyone else will be able to download the videos. See also this page to make it easy for people to put an amazon donation badge on their sites.

Link

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
The total number of dead is now believed to be more than 80,000, and rising. In some places, one in every four citizens have lost their lives. Many of the areas hit were extremely poor to begin with, and some 1/3 of the dead are children. Following up on previous BoingBoing posts about fundraising and relief efforts kick-started in the blogosphere:

Scott Hanselman proposes that Google allow bloggers that use AdSense to donate ad proceeds to tsunami relief. Link (Thanks, Peter Provost).

Andy Carvin at Digital Divide Network says, “In response to this week’s devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Digital Divide Network has created an online community workspace on disaster relief and emergency preparedness: Link. The virtual community can be used for posting online resources, documents, news, and articles about tsunami relief efforts. Users also may take advantage of the site’s Web bulletin board and post their own blog entries.”

BoingBoing reader Andrew Falconer proposes that folks who’ve received holiday gift cards convert them into donations to a tsunami relief charity. “I’ve emailed Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Swapagift.com… regarding gift card donations directly to tsunami relief charities. Amazon.com… has already implement

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…