Top Five Hurricane Information Sources and Tools

In occasion of the announcement of Dean as the first hurricane of the ‘07 Atlantic Season . . . these are at the top of our list:

1. NOAA-NWS National Hurricane Center
   The mother of all sources – most other services rely on the National Weather Service data to start with. RSS updates include ‘basin-wide’ feeds: here’s the Atlantic.
2. NOAA Weather Radio All Hazard
   When all else fails (and you better believe it will, if you are among those really needing the news) this radio signal will carry on the news.
3. IBISEYE
   Possibly the most effective mesh up of weather data and Google Maps.
   
4. The Miami Herald Hurricane page – for which much credit must be give to the excellent Tropical Weather section at Weather Underground (also check out their nifty flash-based storm tracker.)
5. Google Earth addicts will find the best collection of live weather and storm tracking info in this KMZ collection we covered back in March. (Thanks to GEBlog.com) Includes hurricanes live positions, global cloud coverage, NOAA severe weather, etc.

Applegate: Early Warning & Crisis Management in the Web 2.0 Era

What some in Silicon Valley are now calling ‘Applegate’ – a serious Apple Inc, stock price fluctuation caused by an inaccurate blog announcement – is a perfect sample of crisis management (CM) challenges for public companies in the Web economy. For those who missed it, here is the short version of the May 16 events:

• At 11:49 AM EST, famed tech blog Engadget announces that, according to an internal Apple source, the highly anticipated iPhone and Leopard (Apple’s next OS version) will not meet the target release dates.
• Between 11:56 AM and 12:02 AM, Apple stock faces a brutal selloff, with prices going from $107.89 to $103.42 – equivalent to a 3% or about $4 billion loss in market capitalization.
• Within less than two hours, Apple PR responds stating that the email suggesting the delay was a fake and that products are on schedule. (The full sequence of events and the Engadget version of the facts is available here.)
• Apples stock bounces back within the day but not without a good number of angry investors calling for an SEC investigation.

The 1982 Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol crisis remains one of the great examples of effective management in the CM field. . .

Customized Google Maps

Google Maps just received a welcome addition to its features with a ‘My Maps’ option. The new service allows you to customize maps adding lines, shapes, photos, video and HTML descriptions. What makes this interesting for security operators is the ability to share the custom maps with their team or customers. For example, immediately following an incident, operators could quickly publish a map with all the incoming information about it, from affected area boundaries to images from the field and critical links. The custom maps can also be exported to Google Earth.

Team Bookmarking (a.k.a. ‘Social Bookmarking for the Office’) Overview

The popularity of Social bookmarking sites and applications exploded recently when they became associated with tagging and social news, and when the blogosphere began to explode. (Tags are in fact one of the most useful outcomes of social bookmarking which allow every minute millions of users to add context and meaning to the most diverse content, making the Net a more useful and intelligible place.) There are dozens of social bookmarking services out there, and plenty of comparative reviews already, but only a few seem to fit a corporate work/research team environment and the needs of OSInt operators. Here are the ones we found of interest and worthy of consideration . . .

Praises or Blame: What’s the Word on Your Company?

You don’t have to belong to the Multinational Monitor’s list of the Top Ten Worst Corporations, or have your very own ’spoof’ site (WhirledBank, Microsuck, McSpotlight, Monsantosucks, Compaqsucks, etc.) to be concerned with negative coverage of your organization on the Web. However, sorting through the thousands of results that a name search will produce on the average multinational corporation is hardly an effective way to spot the ‘disgruntled’ view. One search method involves creating your own list . . .