After the earthquake hit yesterday, a big red dot appeared over China on the Managing News dashboard map that dwarfed all the other dots around the globe. Next to it in the tag cloud, I saw a few new terms in red that I knew were probably related to the China story, and I started clicking to learn more. I quickly learned that Sun Weide is the Olympic spokesperson giving updates about the changes in the Olympic torch relay plans due to the earthquake, and that the construction project at the Three Gorges Dam wasn't affected. But who was Ronen Medzini, and why was "cellular telephone" showing up as a relevant term?

It turns out he is an Israeli student in the Chengdu area who sent a text message to the AP after the earthquake: "Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting."

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Robin Hamman from the BBC wrote on his personal Cybersoc.com blog today about some aggregation work he's been doing with Yahoo! Pipes. We love what he's up to. (HT: I got the tweet from Rheingold's feed.)

With the rise of so many citizen journalists, Robin is trying to solve the problem of information clutter by filtering through social media sites looking for keywords that might be signals of a real breaking story. By using Pipes, he has built a single RSS feed that searches for a keyword across several social media sites where citizen reports are likely to pop up: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and on blog search engines Technorati and IceRocket.

Using good keywords that could signal a big story -- he picked Explosion, Evacuation, and Bomb to start -- gives him feeds that let him know whenever chatter about one of these terms spikes online. Using a couple other tools that Pipes offers, he's able to do a little extra filtering and make sure he's cutting out as much clutter as possible and still finding the good stuff. Here's a picture of what part of this Pipe looks like:

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