Archive for 18 January, 2010
The weather outside (was) frightful
I’ve perhaps been guilty of overdoing the ‘oh-my-god-its-still-snowing’ posts on the blog recently (the white stuff lasted 4 ½ weeks in the end) and I can’t imagine that anyone outside the snow-bound UK would have found them particularly interesting.
But what I have found invaluable as I’ve tried to make the decision in recent weeks whether to risk the journey into work has been traffic and weather updates (complete with photos) from my friends on twitter and facebook. It’s been like a (private) public service. Ice on the A65? Traffic jams in Horsforth? Someone will kindly let me know.
pic by the lovely @LisaWisniowski
Although the local radio stations were busy collating traffic and snow news, with listeners phoning in live reports, the bit of the online world focused on the UK didn’t seem to have found a way to crowd source on the ground information in this way.
In North America, their National Weather Service has just launched a Twitter-based program to monitor tweets about severe weather (tweets are tagged #wxreport), but we don’t seem to have a UK equivalent. Time to sort it out before the next cold snap?
