ReadWriteWeb

Part of covering the culture of technology is covering technology's use by the culture at large. At a certain point, however, I have had to acknowledge that we are not a general news organization. We don't cover world news, conflicts, crises. We cover technology. And when you attempt to force news to fit inside your frame, you run the risk of deforming it. As @laurenist put it, "Every major news event now also turns into a story about social media."

Social media is common enough, thankfully, that it has become a tool for dealing with news in a larger context. The mere fact that people are using social media in a given situation does not make that a piece of tech news.

Last Tuesday New Zealand time, the city of Christchurch suffered a destructive and deadly earthquake. Measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, the quake wreaked havoc because it was shallow and close to the city center. It was the second major earthquake to have hit Christchurch in 5 months, after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on September 4, 2010. While the loss of life wasn't nearly as bad as the Haiti earthquake of January 2010, Christchurch has been devastated and its people are emotionally scarred. They've endured months of aftershocks since September, then the cruel shock of another Big One.

It's easy to feel helpless after such a devastating natural disaster, but social media tools have been usefully deployed over the past week. Last Tuesday we looked at how the Web mobilized straight after the quake. In this post we look at 3 specific ways that social media has stepped up to the plate, since then.

Today the New Zealand city of Christchurch was rocked by another large earthquake, a magnitude 6.3 that was shallow and hit close to the city center. It follows months of aftershocks from the first big earthquake to strike Christchurch, a magnitude 7.1 on 4 September last year. A personal note: I live in Wellington, New Zealand, which is about 200 miles from Christchurch. However, I have a number of relatives who live in Christchurch and I'm concerned about their safety.

I first learned of the quake via Twitter, including tweets from people I follow who live in Christchurch. Most of the initial tweets and re-tweets were of coverage by local media: the TV, newspaper and radio networks. Soon after, a People Finder service was published by Google and social media sites like Reddit created special web pages to track the latest news. I've also been tracking my own family's updates via Facebook.

On the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, journalist Peter Aldhous created a data visualization that shows how the Carribean country's relatively low seismic earthquake had as many fatalities as all but one earthquake over a time span of almost 40 years.

The data visualization is striking but also a study in how journalists are increasingly telling stories that leverage datasets that are freely available to the public.

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief for New Scientist magazine, created the interactive graphics. We asked him to explain how he created the visualizations which compare seismic activity to fatalities caused by earthquakes over the span of four decades.

Yesterday, I opined that not enough social media actions aside from donations actually benefit disaster relief or other humanitarian efforts.

However, it seems that at least one organization is helping Web users make their time and clicks count for a good cause, and I've never been happier to eat my words. The Haiti Earthquake Support Center, a project from The Extraordinaires (more on that later), allows users to make possible matches between submitted photos of missing persons and photos of Haitians post-earthquake.

In the immediate aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake that caused an unbelievable amount of destruction to Haiti's capital, Google has been asked by relief organizations and users to show images of what's actually happening on the ground.

In partnership with geospatial imagery company GeoEye, Google has just released a new layer for Google Earth showing post-earthquake devastation. Haiti was first added to Google Map Maker in response to hurricanes that wreaked havoc on the country more than a year ago. Read on for before-after pictures and details.

As you probably know, Haiti was struck by a devastating earthquake last night. According to the latest estimates, over 100,000 people may have died and large parts of the island's infrastructure have been destroyed.

Here is a short list of things you can do right now to get help to Haiti. Just watch out for unsolicited emails. Quite a few scammers and spammers are trying to profit from this catastrophe and have set up fake donation sites and are running phishing scams.

It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter. It's all over the site, including being broken on Twitter-based news organization BreakingNewsOn, which is reporting a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in the UK with minimal damage reported so far. Where didn't we hear about the quake? The mainstream press.