Kaye Tram­mell, another friend and blog­ger who’s an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Louisiana State Uni­ver­sity in in Baton Rouge, La., launched the instantly pop­u­lar Kaye’s Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina Blog to serve as a resource to help peo­ple cope with the tragedy.

Kaye’s instant blog is a won­der­ful exam­ple of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism and the kind of per­sonal media ser­vice that mil­lions of us are com­ing to depend on. Thank you, Kaye. Here is some blo­gos­phere dis­cus­sion about Kaye’s Hur­ri­cane Blog.

My friend Ernie Sven­son, who blogs at Ernie the Attor­ney, lived and worked in New Orleans until this week. He offers sev­eral poignant accounts of how this cat­a­stro­phe is affect­ing his fam­ily (they’ve all tem­porar­ily relo­cated to sub­ur­ban Louisiana).

Obvi­ously, we are for­tu­nate and the change in our lives is not any­thing like the hor­ri­ble change that oth­ers will face. Still, from my lim­ited per­spec­tive it is quite inter­est­ing to con­sider how this change affects kids. My kids are used to being around a highly con­nected world where they can IM their friends and use com­put­ers. Now they are in a rural set­ting, and their cell­phones don’t work very well. They can text mes­sage me and some of their friends, but that’s about it. My older daugh­ter Brid­get cel­e­brated her 16th birth­day party on Sat­ur­day at my house with about 15 of her close friends. Yes­ter­day she started school in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent city and she has no idea where some of her friends from her birth­day party are.

All of my kids are try­ing to grap­ple with the sud­den change that they are fac­ing. They are old enough to have intri­cate expec­ta­tions of how their life is sup­posed to be. And this tragedy has com­pletely exploded those expec­ta­tions. They ask the obvi­ous ques­tions: when will be able to go home? Why can’t we go home in a few weeks and just go back to our school if they school is not too dam­aged? But they don’t fully grasp the enor­mity of this cat­a­stro­phe. Prob­a­bly they don’t want to. This is not the sort of thing that the human mind can assim­i­late in just a few hours, or even a few days.

The econ­omy of New Orleans is non-existent and will be that way for months. The first order of busi­ness is res­cu­ing, fol­lowed by clean up and restora­tion of basic core infra­struc­ture. I bet it will be months before the city gets to a min­i­mal level of func­tion­ing. The flood­ing and water dam­age to the city is not some­thing that can be com­pre­hended. I sug­gest you read Ris­ing Tide: The Great Mis­sis­sippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed Amer­ica. This cat­a­stro­phe will change Amer­ica and we don’t yet grasp how that will hap­pen. We’re still in ‘res­cue mode’ and ‘shock mode.’ It will take us all a long time to process how life-altering this hur­ri­cane was.

San Jose Merc: Microsoft in ven­ture to develop Inter­net TV.

The dream of bring­ing an abun­dance of dig­i­tal TV pro­grams and video to liv­ing rooms via the Inter­net edged for­ward Mon­day as Microsoft and Scientific-Atlanta, a major TV set-top device maker, announced an agree­ment to work together.

Microsoft would pro­vide the soft­ware oper­at­ing sys­tem and Scientific-Atlanta would make the set-top boxes that would let peo­ple access and con­trol all their dig­i­tal con­tent — video, pho­tos, music — from one place. The two com­pa­nies’ tech­nolo­gies would sup­port the roll­out of Internet-based TV by tele­com giant SBC.

The alliance is an impor­tant step for SBC, which plans to deliver its ver­sion of IPTV, or Inter­net Pro­to­col TV, to select mar­kets by year’s end or early 2006. SBC, the Baby Bell tele­com giant, is devot­ing $4 bil­lion to its IPTV rollout. …

“We refer to it as next-generation TV,” said Ed Graczyk, mar­ket­ing direc­tor for Microsoft TV.

San Jose Merc: Apple plans sur­prise: vPod? iTunes phone? Apple Com­puter plans a major announce­ment Sept. 7 in San Fran­cisco, spark­ing spec­u­la­tion that the com­pany that rev­o­lu­tion­ized dig­i­tal music will unveil a video-playing iPod or an iTunes mobile phone.

Steve Rosen­berg in the Sep­tem­ber issue of Doc­u­men­tary mag­a­zine: Will con­tent evolve into an open-source universe?

Tech­nol­ogy and pas­sion has helped to re-light the con­tent dri­ven world of doc[umentary] pro­duc­tion. Now, thanks to the ubiq­uity of tools, there is a future just around the cor­ner in which the key word is Collaboration.

kpaul mal­lasch pointed out this video com­pendium of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism storm chasers — peo­ple who chron­i­cled the after­math of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. It’s a Win­dows Media Video file from Hurricanelivenet.com.

As the nar­ra­tor says, “Words can­not describe what you’re about to see.”

I spent some time with my super-smart friend and col­league Eliz­a­beth Osder down in Santa Mon­ica on Fri­day night. Eliz­a­beth recently joined Yahoo!, and we talked a bit about the company’s media strat­egy, Brad Horowitz, Scott Gatz, and other peo­ple we admire.

When I returned home, the mail­box con­tained the Sep­tem­ber issue of Wired mag­a­zine, with this story: The Super Net­work. Why Yahoo! will be the cen­ter of the million-channel universe.

Well, we’ll see. They cer­tainly have the chance to pull it off, if they align with the right peo­ple (and I don’t mean Hollywood).

Here is USA Today’s Kat­rina blog.

OK, but where are the cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism videos and pho­tos? That is what peo­ple want to see. Still images should be inter­spersed through­out this blog, and there needs to be a land­ing page that aggre­gates all the videos and pho­tos sent in by people.

Instead, we get Real videos that force us to watch a USA Today com­mer­cial first. (No thanks.) That, and links to Flickr.

Wired News: Bugged by changes imposed after the portal’s pur­chase of the hip photo site, some irate Flickr mem­bers plan a mass ID sui­cide to show their disapproval.

From Monday’s NY Times: Missed Church? No Wor­ries. Down­load It to Your IPod.