puyddiG

I'm sick to think of the children the boy's age killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. They could number in the dozens. Or worse.

And the total loss of life looks to be in the thousands. What a nightmare.

Today as I post this I wonder about the Hayward Fault killing us and this video surviving us on the internet. As videoblogging spreads around the world it's inevitable that somebody's going to die with their videos still online. I haven't trawled the discussion boards enough to find out whether people are thinking that way in the context of OurMedia's pledge to host files "forever." To whatever extent their pledge is true all of us could be dead with our videos still online.

Which returning to the context of today, the start of September 2005, perhaps some of the dead in Louisiana and Mississippi have left behind text blogs, or flickr albums, or other kinds of web ephemera that persist even if their houses and all their belongings have been submerged or simply swept away. I'm sure examples of this will emerge in the coming weeks, drawing out the grief of those of us who spend too much time looking at a computer screen.

But it's not any more tragic than the death of someone who'd never sat at a computer, let alone posted anything online. And given the economic dimension of this disaster there will likely be a large number of those.

I'm sick to think of it all.

Oh, the video? It's kind of funny. I think he even knows it.

Length: 0:58

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