A recent large fire at the Yellowknife landfill had the city all a twitter with advice (“keep the windows closed”) and Twitpics of the huge cloud of black smoke that could be seen across the city, such as this series posted by Val Pond.
There was plenty of information on Twitter, but the city was silent.
There has been talk in council of using Twitter (for a full list of councillor social media links, check out Kyle’s listing.) I think that’s a good start, and keeping its website up-to-date would be another avenue.
Nanaimo's website features emergency warning registration form
For instance, the city of Nanaimo website features a prominent Emergency Notification link on its homepage. You register with a form and can receive emergency notifications via telephone or email. The phone/email you receive will detail the nature of the situation and give instructions on what to do.
This is a great idea, I think Yellowknife should adopt it. How about you?
With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.
I recently began to use Twitter at work and decided it was time I got around to signing up for an account with HootSuite to make it easier to tweet from both work and home. I already knew this tool allows for scheduled tweets but I didn’t know that you can:
- manage user profiles to let multiple people tweet from same account
- “Enable auto track” to add initials to tweet
- embed Google AdSense to generate money from your tweets
- tweet your RSS feed (advised to select frequency of tweets so as not to appear spammy)
- collect stats on click-throughs of your links
For more information on this great Twitter power tool, I recommend this blog post by Chris Spagnuolo.
This blog is my first experience in the world of PHP and Wordpress. Dynamic content is what the web is all about, and as Wordpress is the easiest Content Management System out there, it seemed like the perfect introduction.
There are many reasons for using Wordpress: it’s free and open source, it’s user friendly, it has themes to make your blog look like a regular site, it’s search engine friendly and standards compliant. Now I need to explore more themes and plug-ins to test this out.
As I am a student of new media/web design, and a former print journalist, my blog will focus on issues relating to those topics, with some general nerd stuff thrown in, too (I am a sci-fi fan!).
I am already commenting about these issues on Twitter, now I can go over 140 words 
