Blogging from the disaster zone.

The NYT has a link-rich article about people blogging from the tsunami disaster zone. The Times includes quotes about the positive side of blogging:

Bloggers at the scene are more deeply affected by events than the journalists who roam from one disaster to another ...

"[Bloggers] are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that other media just can't," with an intimate voice and an unvarnished perspective, with the richness of local context...

There is also some disappointment:

One veteran of the online medium said he was initially "a little disappointed" in the reports he got from the blogs. Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in California, said that with the widespread use of digital cameras and high-speed digital access, he was expecting to see more raw video and analysis.

He said that upon reflection he realized that it was difficult to get information out of hard-hit areas and that putting digital video online is still the domain of "deep geeks" with significant resources. "This brought home to me just how far we have to go," he said.