Social media and disasters

There's a fascinating story in The Guardian's data blog about how social media have allowed information to be shared in the aftermath of the explosions at the finish of the Boston marathon yesterday. Social media played an important role as local sites set up accommodation offers as well as information. Twitter was very important - and I learned about a site, Trendsmap, that provides real time mapping of Twitter feeds (in all languages, not just English). And it's interactive - click on one of those links and the Twitter feed appears in a window:

It appears that the investigators have found a circuit board used to trigger the bombs.

ESRI, which I've written about before, does something similar, though not in real time.