Image from the U.S. Navy's Flickr feed
At PopMatters, there’s a good look at how the current set of social media tools is being used in Japan during the crisis. This post details a utility that began on Facebook as a group, has expanded onto Twitter with a set of hashtags, a shared folder on Dropbox with downloadable resources, YouTube embeds, Flickr feed embeds, and so on. The interesting thing here is watching how this communication all grew organically—the initial post on Facebook was meant to simply be a list of names and addresses of missing folks from Miyagi and Sendai, but has since expanded somewhat. It’s a great example of spontaneous, engineered community for the purpose of halting a crisis.