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.