jtara - 11:31 pm on Oct 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

A few thoughts:

- Reverse-911 currently works only for landlines. (No way to "register" a cell phone with the system.) At the same time, there is a trend toward dropping landlines altogether.

- People at work often don't have access to radio/TV, but do have access to the web

- Traditional local media outlets can fail in an emergency

- The above suggests that your website may be more important than you think in an emergency

- If your site is locally-oriented, is it also physically located in the same area? If yours might become a critical information resource, do you have a backup site in a different geographical area? Do you have adequate capacity to handle the load of emergency traffic? (The failure of the San Diego Union-Tribine website this morning prompts this question - it appears they didn't have adequate capacity. And their co-location facility is local.)

- Do you have obsolete emergency-related links or information on your site? There was some frustration about this expressed on the forums on the Union-Tribune site today (once they got back up). (Not regarding the newspaper site itself - but other emergency-related sites. For example, one site still had information only on fires from last year.)

- Can anyone recommend widgets that can be placed on the home page for up-to-date emergency information? We all know about the widget for Amber Alerts. (Right?) But what about widespread emergencies? Are there widgets for general disasters, earthquake, fire, etc.?