Weather watchers create Hurricane Irene Facebook pages to keep family, friends …
August 27, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
By Tiffini Theisen and Tiffini Theisen
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
As Hurricane Irene’s forecast path this week has targeted the heavily populated U.S. eastern seaboard, weather watchers have taken to Facebook to create dozens of Hurricane Irene pages for updates about the storm’s progress, preparation tips and more.
Facebook, the world’s most mainstream social network, is a relatively easy way for non-technical people to act as their own publishers.
In this case, pages are letting Facebook users supplement more official sources such as the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service, local emergency managers, news media and others that have their own Facebook pages.
Undeterred by concerns about originality or redundancy, the creators of the vast majority of the home-made pages titled them simply “Hurricane Irene.”
“Christie advises NJ residents to prepare with 5 days of food and water,” alerted a post by one of the “Hurricane Irene” pages, which by early this afternoon boasted 541 fans.
Other pages and communities were created with a niche audience in mind, like the “Hurricane Irene 2011 Animal Rescue Resource Page”, created “to help coordinate those who might need help with their pets or fostered rescues due to evacuations.”
Another niche audience for some pages is hyper-local, including “Hurricane Irene/Tropical Storm Irene,” a community that focuses on how the hurricane will affect Boston residents.
There is also no shortage of comic relief. The “Hurricane Irene is coming! Hide yo kids, hide yo wife she’s gonna find you” page riffs on a popular Internet meme from earlier this year; though it publishes almost exclusively links to official news sources.
One jokey page – again called just “Hurricane Irene” – pretends to be the voice of the storm. For example, posted today: “I have some good news and some bad news for all you haters out there. First, my eye wall is badly damaged. I don’t think I can get it back together again in the 24 hours or so I have left over the ocean.”
