Just saw this post from Andy Carvin ... where he called for an International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day. Andy says :

Why haven't we see a Katrina-related blog of TsunamiHelp-like proportions? You would think that the US, the birthplace of blogging, would have been able to catalyze a who's who of bloggers to coordinate information sharing, just as TsunamiHelp did. Instead, we've seen a scattering of blogs pop up here and there, doing their best to share information. But it's distributed and dispersed, with no coordination between them.

Meanwhile, I've also noticed that many blogs have gone on with their daily lives as if Katrina never happened. Sure, they may have mentioned it once or twice, but have they posted any Katrina resources? Have they linked to the Red Cross? Have they encouraged people to donate blood? Some, yes. Most, no. Anti-Bush blogs continue to bash Bush, while pro-Bush blogs continue to praise him. Travel blogs continue to talk about travel. Tech blogs talk tech, pet blogs talk pets. Can't we all just take a break and focus on helping disaster victims for just a moment?

We now live in an age of tagging, RSS and distributed computing. Perhaps we don't need to have all of these great bloggers posting to one site, or have bloggers focused full-time on the disaster. All we really need is to get as many people as possible using the blogging tools available of them, posting whatever Katrina-related information they're comfortable with, then use tags and RSS feeds to bring it all together.

While I do feel the situation during the tsunamis was a little different - with news being so scattered and difficult to come by, and the affected areas more spread-out, hence the relevance of real voices in real time greater, I can't help being surprised by the absence of a large blogger community effort to help victims this time round.  Especially when so many of the movers and shakers and developers of 'social tools' and their adaptations and iterations live in the same country or closeby.
 
The KatrinaHelp wiki and blog teams, made up of people across USA, Europe, Bahrain, India and many more places, are currently also working with some of the developers around the Skype API and the SkypeJournal team (all independents, and Skype too has been supportive by offering up free SkypeOut minutes) and have managed to set up a kind of messaging centre between volunteers on the ground to connect those needing help with those that have it to offer.  Also, working on sms-Skype-sms transfers of info around aid and relief. I'm currently manning the calls out and in, sitting in my living room in Mumbai, and taking and making calls to volunteers close to New Orleans .. it's just my turn.    

Lets see how it emerges.   What we could build around blogs and wikis and RSS and tagging and VOIP !  There are so many possibilities.