Crisis Mapping Meets Check-in
New features could make a Web tool that has helped track events in Japan and the Middle East even more useful.
Monday, March 28, 2011, By David Talbot
MIT Technology Review
EXTRACT: The new feature is known as “check-in,” also used by social sites like Foursquare—in that case as a way of alerting friends to your presence at a particular location.
For Ushahidi, this is “a pretty powerful step forward,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a board member of the nonprofit, and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “Adding check-in to this equation allows me to pull my data apart from the whole. That makes maps usable for multiple purposes—group reporting as well as tracking of my own movements.”
Enabling such tracking simply requires a GPS-equipped phone to allow a quick log-in to record whereabouts
