Development Seed Blog

There's an interesting article from the NYT about how people are using websites like Craigslist.org to search for friends and relatives missing in the flooding from the hurricane, similar to website posting after recent events like the Tsunami and September 11. I'm curious to know how often this helps and what website most people post on. Does this help these people be found? It seems if there were a few central websites that do this, it would help free up relief workers who are answering phone requests from people looking for relatives who instead can just regularly check a website. It would also help if phone lines were jammed or not working.

FindKatrina.com says they are bulding a section for people to enter in their success stories using the site, but when I tried to visit it the website was down. It would be interested to try to track the success rate and get anecdotal stories from people using it.