The Command Post: How to help.

Tim Bray posts his "browser market share" graphic again.

I've been seeing quite a few people posting their browser market share numbers and Tim seems to be fairly representative of bloggers' shares.

I've heard numbers from "mainstream" sites which are far different, though, but no one will go on the record. Anyone from MSN, Google, Yahoo wanna share their graphs?

Update: Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo has some more interesting numbers and analysis.

Dare Obasanjo: This is probably one of the most insensitive and unthinking posts I've seen in a while.

My answer? I'm getting creamed on this one in my comments. I'm sorry. But it wasn't what I intended. I was reacting to a bunch of the hype and overconfidence that the blogosphere has shown lately. Including in my own writings. That the blogosphere was gonna outshine the professional reports.

I was trying to point out that the professionals completely outshined the blogosphere in early reports and it came out wrong. For that, I apologize.

Interesting how Dare and a few other people assumed the worst about what I was thinking and posting, but won't also point to the post made minutes before that showed where to send help.

But, I am sorry if anyone was offended by my post.

More first-hand geek reports about earthquake/tsunami from the scene. This one from Paschal L and posts a couple of photos.

I took Patrick today to Amoeba Music. Anyone think the music industry still doesn't have legs should be forced to visit this store. We had to wait in line to get to a cash register. And they were ringing.

Are you one of those people who thinks Microsoft isn't cool? OK, I'll grant you that, but inside this store, which is in the famous Haight/Ashbury district in San Francisco (it's a mecca for music lovers, people visit this store from all over the world) are some hot and happening listening kiosks. They are the best I've seen at any store. Have an entire catalog to listen to, not just the lame few CDs that other stores let you listen to on one of their kiosks.

I snapped a picture. You have to wait in line to get on one of the kiosks. And, of course, the kiosks are running on Windows. That's cool enough for me.

Jason Fried gets excited about the iPod sock. I had a demo of the sock today. Maryam's friend Sam showed me her sock. Sam's husband works at Yahoo.

I'm a geek. I'd never be caught dead with a device in a sock. Just shows that I am clueless.

Andrew Sutton on the VB Blogs tells about his experience of witnessing the tsunami while on vacation.

DopplerRadio (my favorite podcast receiving tool) is thinking of holding a Geek Dinner in Stockholm this week too.

A note to Marc Canter: I've had a couple of calls in the past few minutes and the callers have asked me to consider a more inclusive restaurant (translation: more affordable).

Plus, Tantek just pointed out that we should pick some place where there hasn't been a geek dinner before. (He recommended Chaat Cafe on 3rd and Folsom).

I'll leave it up to you and the other bloggers who are coming. What do you all think? I don't really care either way. I just want a place to meet with my friends and a decent meal.

I just put a bunch more stuff up on the linkblog, including a couple of personal reports from the quake and tsunami zone.

It's amazing how few people around the blogosphere are posting today. Lots of people are on vacation.

Makes me think that most blogging is actually done from work.

Bob Wyman, founder of PubSub is saying that MSN Spaces is making searches for the word "blog" pretty useless.

Dori, it'd be awesome to have you at the geek dinner. But it won't be at the Cheesecake Factory. Marc Canter (the guy who started what became Macromedia) gave me a ton of poop this afternoon. Said that we must pick a better restaurant. Now, if you know who Marc is, you know he knows his food.

So I called him up, made peace, and told him to pick a restaurant.

And that's how we ended up at Restaurant Lulu. Now, this breaks a few of my geek dinner rules. First, it's not scalable. We need to tell the restaurant how many people will show up. Two, it's not cheap. I'd expect to to pay $40 to $60, depending on whether or not you have alcohol.

That said, it should be a great geek dinner. Om Malik of Business 2.0 magazine says he'll be there. Marc is gonna be there. Who else? RSVP by sending me a note at rscoble@microsoft.com or leaving a comment here.

Ahh, maybe you just have to do the right search. Here's a Technorati search for Phuket Tsunami which has more first-hand reports.

I'll do a Pubsub one for that too. Thanks to Bryan Rieger for pointing that out.

By the way, PubSub really rocks (it lets you search blogs only and build an RSS feed so you can watch a specific search term over time -- something none of the big three search engines let you do). My posts only took a few minutes to start showing up in the earthquake feed I built. There's remarkably little blogging going on about the earthquake.

It's really disappointing. Citizen Journalism is really failing here. Almost no first-hand reports.

The mainstream press kicked the blogosphere's a##.

Command Post has the most comprehensive blogging I've seen so far on the quake.

I'm outta here, gonna go to San Francisco for the day with my son. Anyone wanna meetup? I'm looking for fun things to do. 425-205-1921.

Speaking of fun, let's plan a geek dinner. Thursday night. At the Cheesecake Factory in Union Square. 6 p.m. Last one of the year. Lots of people already say they'll be there.

Hope you all are enjoying your day.

Someone asked "what can we do to help?"

The usual answer in these cases is to donate money to the Red Cross, right? If you work for a company that matches your donation, make sure you work through them. (Microsoft, for instance, matches contributions to charitable causes).

If you have other ideas, leave a comment here, or link here on your own blog and I'll link back.

Slashdot is talking about the quakes.

Tariq promises a personal account.

More on my link blog. I gotta go out today, so won't post for a while here, but I've built a PubSub query/RSS feed so I'll link to the best of personal accounts here.

So, here's a chance to try out my list of news sites and see which one does the best with the earthquake coverage. I should add Technorati's news page to that list. I still love Memeorandum because it joins mainstream press and blogs together.

Woke up this morning to bad news. My heart goes out to all those affected by the earthquake. Thanks Loic for bringing me the news. A friend (who works at Microsoft Research) is in Thailand on one of the islands. Don't know how she faired.

Whew, she was in part of Thailand that's not affected by the tsunamis.

I've put a bunch of stuff on my link blog.