Wednesday, May 18, 2005

more on the quake feed....this is really the tip of the iceberg for what can be provided as a public service. volcanic activity, forest fires, traffic alerts, dangerous weather alerts.....speaking of weather, a couple of weeks back, i dropped a comment on one of my favorite blogs - The Community Engine - from Bud Gibson, a professor at U of M in Ann Arbor. Bud is really pushing the blogging envelope in a university environment and is using a blog with a group of students to teach them how to use blogs to assist a business. The business they are assisting is a water damage restoration service in Ann Arbor. see, in Michigan, it gets really cold and pipes burst in houses....water damage quickly ensues. now, in my comment, i thought it would be a really useful thing for someone to plant a bunch of thermocouplers in the ground around the area to monitor ground temperatures. i would believe that if someone did some homework, they could likely model/correlate the depth of ground freezing to the most likely time for a house pipe to burst. say, once the ground is 32 degrees or colder at a depth of 3 feet, there is a very strong probability of burst pipes in a home. no doubt, there are plenty of variables to consider, but, if someone would take the time to measure ground temp, send the data to a blog enabled computer, then once the temp hits a certain range, the computer auto generates a warning of ground freeze. this warning is fed to a blog and all that have subscribed to the feed for that blog will get an impending freeze notification. after that, they do whatever people in the north do to prevent frozen pipes. for the restoration guys, they may put more people on call based upon the warning..... now, i could get all theoretical and innovative, but will just stop at this. the point is; blogs and RSS can be used for so many things. seeing the USGS alert system going into effect really solidifies my belief in this tool/concept. that's why i am doing the 101 uses for a blog...to help illustrate what is possible and hopefully, encourage others to think along the same lines....the above freeze early warning system is blog use #10. 11:24:16 PM    comment []

Man, am I prescient or what?? Without any prior knowledge, I correctly indicated that via a blog/RSS, people would have the ability to receive live early warning information about earthquakes. Check out this site - U.S. Geological Survey Now, go look at my post about blog use #6. It's right there!! Know doubt the USGS guys had already thought about this, but it appears great mind think alike. 7:22:07 PM    comment []

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