Bloggers have been busy covering the enormous wildfires that have been destroying homes in Southern California. The number of posts have soared over the past few days. This pattern is typical of disasters and other breaking news events. You can see a chart on the right from Technorati that shows the increase in the number of blog posts. This chart shows the number of posts when Technorati is searched for the phrase "california fires." There will be many more posts once evacuees are able to return home and blog about their experience like this blogger did. We already know that at least 1,500 homes have been lost -- hopefully the final tally won't be much higher than that. The good news is that the Santa Ana winds are fading and fire crews are finally starting to make some progress in their tough battle against the fires. Here's another roundup of blogosphere fire coverage. You can find our previous posts about the fires here.
L.A. Times Breaking News Blog says San Diego officials were upbeat during a press conference yesterday afternoon about the city returning to normal soon. "The vast majority of San Diego is open for repopulation," said Mayor Jerry Sanders. The weather report is also encouraging.
The Wall Street Journal has launched a blog about the wildfires. Coverage so far includes the arson probe by the FBI; homeowner insurance worries and the reverse 911 system.
Videos: Helicopter dumps water on Lake Arrowhead fire; California resident films the Witch Fire, apartment complex burns in Rancho Bernardo and Reporter Larry Himmel reports in front of his burning home.
Odd Times Signatures tells the mainstream media to stop comparing this disaster to Hurricane Katrina.
CNN anchor Glenn Beck is the man who labeled Californians losing homes as America haters. Now he is back to explain how the fires started. If you guessed that Glenn Beck blamed the Californians you guessed correctly.
They are fighting over there but we need them over here - are there enough National Guard troops here in the U.S. for emergencies? New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson thinks there are not enough here because of the Iraq War: "Today, as the fires rage, California has National Guard men, women, and critical equipment thousands of miles away in Iraq. They need to come home. We need them here." A post on The Seminal has more about the availability of the National Guard to respond to disasters. Even Former FEMA chief Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown doesn't think we have enough responders.
Why did the fires start and why did the fires become so intense and so large? Yes, the blaming has started. Theories for fire causes include arson, downed electrical lines, shrubs, overbuilding, global warming, Al Qaeda and even Satan. Note: some of the blogs bringing up an Al Qaeda link - like this blog - are using a news story from 2003.
Global Warming: Climate change has been brought up as possibly making the fires larger and more extreme than they would be under normal conditions. Some on the right are arguing against this theory (see here, here, here, here, here and here) but scientists have been talking about megafires fueled by warming temperatures. The Booman Tribune also brings up the recent terrible fires that occured in Greece which may also have a climate change link. RealClimate offers a more detailed look at the Mediterranean Heat. Let's also not forget that it was just last year that there was an unprecidented heat wave in California that was also possibly climate change related. More on the fires and climate change link here, here and here.
Smoke creates a health risk for Southern California residents.
Big tech companies including Qualcomm and Sony Electronics closed down their offices because of the wildfires - primarily because their employees' homes were threatened.
Compiler blogs about how you can use TwitterWhere? to track tweets by location. In this case you could enter locations near the fires to see if anyone is tweeting about them on Twitter.
The Huffington Post reports that losses have topped the $1 billion mark in Southern California.
Things are not good for some of the birds in Southern California either.
No! The WSJ blog also says the avocado crop has been damaged by the fire.
Gearlog has a roundup about ways technology can help with disaster response and fire tracking.
Are the California fires the first web 2.0 disaster - or the first Web 2.0 coverage of a disaster? (via Mathew Ingram). The answer is both yes and no but way more yes than no. A good example is just to look back at our archived coverage in 2005 of Hurricane Katrina. There were lots of blogs back then covering the hurricanes - some of them were weather blogs that had already been following the tropical system before it organized and became Hurricane Katrina. Once the story was really big the MSM even started launching some Hurricane Katrina blogs. However, there was nothing like the embeddable Google Maps that bloggers can easily plug into their posts like we now have available. There were also not nearly as many videos available in 2005 and there were no embeddable videos from sites like YouTube. Also missing in 2005 was Twitter.
Bloggers have been busy covering the enormous wildfires that have been destroying homes in Southern California. The number of posts have soared over the past few days. This pattern is typical of disasters and other breaking news events. You can see a chart on the right from Technorati that shows the increase in the number of blog posts. This chart shows the number of posts when Technorati is searched for the phrase "california fires." There will be many more posts once evacuees are able to return home and blog about their experience like this blogger 
