Commentary: Measuring the power of the web, to help!
This post was published 2 years 11 months 17 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.The heavily tech oriented blogosphere sprang to life to help one of their brothers, James Kim, and his family when they went missing after a few days.
Millions of people offered their assistance, tips, thoughts and prayers for the Kim family and for James, who is still missing. This one horrible incident helped illustrate the power of the web to help those in need.
After this story is no longer in the headlines, it is easy for influential websites to go back to business as usual, forgetting the positive social influence that they carry. If there is one lesson for an outsider to learn from this story, it is that I want to use this site to continue bringing attention to things that NEED attention.
Each year more then 850,000 Americans are reported missing, that’s about 2,300 a day. More then 1,400 women each year die from domestic abuse. A scary thought, but almost none of these victims get attention the Kim family did. So I look to you, our readers, to suggest a way we can use this sites influence to help the overlooked, and get back to our roots of “observing the unobserved.”
Please begin a discussion in our comments, and spread this post across the internet. Even if just one more website can use it’s influence to help someone who normally wouldn’t get prime media attention, and one persons life could be saved or changed – isn’t it worth it?
we should create a website similiar to the amber alert kind of deal… a digital milk carton if you will… only problem would be people posting fakes and thus diluting the seriousness of the service.
If somehow we could find a way to use SMS and RSS like technologies to spread the word based on geographical locations for missing peoples… that could be a service worth building.
Tom goes missing in south florida, a realtive enters his information and last know where abouts, a message is then sent to the cell phones of all volunteers signed up within that area to keep an eye open for the said missing individual… even if it was police driven service.. where police enter the missing person into the database, that could cut back on spammers and hoaxes… then people within the area of that persons last known where abouts might take action, contact the news… something…. anything.
just me rambling off an idea… I can help with the PHP/mySQL/SMS gateway if we should decide to attempt to build something like this.
Chad,
I’m very serious about creating something. Im very interested to see what the community wants, and I will spend whatever it takes to get it done.
I dont want to be cynical but I will. The reason why so many people cared about James Kim is that he isn’t just a normal Joe. We feel we can identify with him somehow. Not all of us can be celebrities, but maybe some sort of social network would be a good way to approach it. I think breaking it into geographical (like the amber alert) and social constraints (hobbies, not necessarily stuff like myspace) would create the most involvement beyond just looking at a picture and praying.