The PBS NewsHour’s Gulf Leak Meter grew out of a simple question: How much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 and sank two days later?

Given a starting point and a flow rate, figuring out how much has spilled isn’t actually that hard: Total = Rate x Time. But choosing the correct rate was probably impossible. Official estimates went from 1,000 barrels a day to 5,000 to somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000. As more information trickled out, independent scientists said the leak could be as high as 100,000 barrels per day.

So the challenge was to build a tool that would do simple math, but had all the uncertainty of the situation baked in. Hence the slider. That way, we let users pick which estimates they believe, and the ticker shows them how much oil has leaked into the Gulf based on that figure.

When BP began siphoning oil directly out of the well using a mile-long tube, I rewrote part of the code to subtract that amount from the leak rate–after the user had picked a leak rate. When BP increased, then decreased, the amount of oil it was capturing, I rewrote the main function again. Now, each time BP tells us how much oil it is sucking up, we create another time segment, adjusted by the siphoned amount, and add it to the total. If this sounds confusing, well, thank BP.

Production notes

The widget itself is embeddable as an iframe. It is built entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. An explanation of the math and a working (though deliberately incorrect) version is available here.

Coverage and Commentary

Al Tompkins, Poynter Online: Virtual Meter Lets Viewers Estimate How Much Oil Is Leaking in Gulf

So far, nothing — not the oily birds or the nasty-looking ribbon of waste floating on the Gulf of Mexico’s surface — has stunned me as much as this rolling graphic from, of all places, the website of the PBS “NewsHour.”

MediaPost: The 100 Most Important Online Publishers

Look no further than the depressing widget Newshour created and the video feed it adapted to keep the public informed about the BP Gulf oil spill disaster and you’ll see why Public Broadcasting still matters online.

PBS MediaShift: 6 Key Lessons From NewsHour’s Coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill

My own debriefing of what worked and what we learned covering the spill.

Last night the NewsHour went all-in covering State of the Union. We had on-air analysis, video from the Capitol and coverage on our new blog, and a new app to annotate the speech as it happened.

The Analyzer (I can never think of clever names for my apps; this is what everyone here calls it) is built in Django, with a lot of help from jQuery. From pitch to launch took exactly a week, including a working weekend.

Read more about the project on my blog.

Production notes:

This was my first major project for the NewsHour. I built the Django application that feeds data into the map and controls the county and community type pages.

The Flash map was built by an outside vendor, and I created hooks to manage it via Django’s admin interface. The database stores close to a half-million individual statistics covering population, ethnicity, religion and culture.

Blogs are imported from a handful of sources and platforms, including the Christian Science Monitor (WordPress MU), community bloggers (Blogger) and the NewsHour.

Back in October, I started building an online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I was using. It has since grown into something I think others will find useful, so I’m releasing it into the wild.

Try out Tools for News

The site is in public beta for now. Eventually, I hope to move it to its own domain.

Anyone can browse this site and subscribe to an RSS feed. Registering allows you to add new tools, add links to existing tools and bookmark tools, which will be saved on your contributor page.

Feeds available (as of Jan. 5, 2009):

• Latest tools
• Latest links
• Tools by category
• Tools by user

Production notes:

The core of the site was built in about two days using Django. I started building it after seeing other bloggers posting lists of tools they use, or that others should use. I wanted a better way to find and organize all of this.

I leaned heavily on reusable Django apps, taking to heart what James Bennett often says: The ability to create focused, reusable applications is Django’s true killer feature. It is. I used three of his apps for this site and four on another, not counting pieces of code inspired by what Bennett and others have given away.

For inspiration, I looked at Django Snippets (built by Bennett, who used it as an example project in his excellent book) and Django Friendly, a site that rates hosting providers for, well, Django friendliness.

Credit also goes to Ryan Sholin, Zac Echola and Rick Martin letting me bounce ideas off them. Thanks guys.

Can California’s cement industry walk the fine line between regulation and innovation to fight global warming?

CUPERTINO, California–From the lip of the quarry at Hanson Permanente cement, all of Santa Clara stretches out in panorama. (Photos here).

Few plants in California are this close to this many people. Most of the state’s 11 kilns are well away from population centers, close enough for workers to commute, but otherwise out of sight.

Here, houses reach right up to the edges the Permanente land, where suburban homes suddenly give way to an industrial road leading up to the expansive plant and the limestone mining operation behind it.

Here, engineers and executives will have to figure out how to make an essentially dirty process clean, or at least cleaner.

As California tries to fight global warming–with or without the rest of the country–cement manufacturing remains one of the trickiest industries to regulate.

“I don’t think there’s anybody quite like cement,” said Mike Tollstrup, one of the state officials overseeing California’s effort to fight global warming on its own. “There are not a lot of facilities. Cement is used everywhere. There are significant issues of leakage. If we don’t do it right, the potential for increasing emissions is a real concern.”

In 2006, California adopted Assembly Bill 32, a law mandating that by 2020, the state cut greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels. The California Air Resources Board, which will oversee implementation, released a Proposed Scoping Plan at the end of October mapping out how the state will reach its goal.

Cement is one of the industries singled out by regulators because, as Tollstrup says, it’s both necessary and necessarily polluting.

Unchecked, carbon emissions from the cement sector would rise 23 percent, from 9.7 million metric tons in 2004 to 12.6 million metric tons in 2020, according to state statistics.

Demand for building materials moves in concert with population growth, and California’s population continues to grow. By 2030, the US Census projects it will exceed 46 million people.

“Long term trends look promising if you’re a cement maker,” said Andy O’Hare, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Portland Cement Association. “First and foremost, any economy is going to need cement from somewhere to continue to grow. We’re working from that premise, and state government seems supportive.”

(Cement and concrete are different things. Concrete is a blend of materials–cement, fine and coarse aggregates, water–that harden into a firm structure. Cement is the glue holding it all together. In dry form, it’s a chalky powder.)

Making cement

At every stage of cement production, there is something to evoke an environmentalist’s worst nightmare.

It starts with limestone. Behind the Permanente plant, an open quarry funnels down 750 feet into the Santa Clara hillside.

Twice a week, mining crews detonate a series of explosives set into the rock face. Water trucks hose down the loose gravel, weighing down dust.

Raw ore moves by conveyor belt through grinders until each chunk reaches a uniform size, about a cubic centimeter.

Turning limestone into lime is the main source of carbon emissions. The mined rock must be heated to 2,700 degrees Farenheit. That uses massive amounts of fuel.

The most common fuel in cement plants is coal, though Permanente doesn’t use it. This plant relies entirely on petroleum coke, a byproduct of oil refinement. Pet Coke isn’t any better for the air than coal (chemically, it’s similar), but it disposes of otherwise troublesome waste. (The same argument is often made when plants begin burning shredded tires or bio-solids from treated sewage.)

Heating limestone turns it into lime, releasing carbon dioxide in the chemical reaction.

What comes out is called clinker. It’s ground into a fine powder and stored, to be mixed with water, sand and gravel to become concrete.
For data visualization of the graph below go here.

Fuel types for making cement

Emissions targets and the intensity standard

The oft-cited measure of cement’s impact on global warming is one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement produced. California plants, on average, are about 10 percent cleaner, putting out only .895 tons of CO2 for each ton of cement. The state would like to see that number drop to .80.

The danger, say all involved, is that cement production could shift out of state. While California’s plants continue to clean up, if their products become too expensive, local builders could make up costs by buying more cement from out of state, negating any emissions gains made here. At the moment, China is the biggest supplier of imported cement, as well as the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases.

To combat leakage of production, the AB32 scoping plan proposes to apply a carbon intensity standard to all cement sold in California, not just what’s produced here. When measuring the carbon footprint of imported cement, regulators say they would count every part of the process, from mining to calcination to shipping.

Manufacturers see this as the best part of the state’s plan. Putting a cost on carbon means shipping cement from China counts against importers. Counting the 20 percent increase in emissions resulting from transport, California kilns maintain an edge.

California consumes more cement than it produces, so some cement is always imported. In a good year (which 2008 is not), the state’s 11 kilns can put out 12 to 13 million metric tons of cement a year. Public and private builders use as much as 16 million metric tons.

“We think that we can set limits that would apply to out of state (and out of country) facilities, too. That way everybody has that requirement,” Tollstrup said. “If you want to sell cement in the state of California, you have to meet that requirement.”

California has done this before, Tollstrup said, pointing to the rule that all gasoline sold in the state must contain an oxygenator–a requirement that led refiners to add MTBE, and later ethanol to fuel blends.

But the state tried applying local emissions standards to automobiles, too, provoking a multi-year fight with the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Bush Administration, which tried to block California’s tailpipe rules. With George W. Bush about to leave office, though, Tollstrup is optimistic.

Economic impact

In theory, cleaning up will be good for business.

In 2020, according to an economic analysis of AB 32 commissioned by the Air Resources Board, the state’s economy will have:

• Increased production activity by $27 billion
• Increased overall Gross State Product by $4 billion
• Increased overall personal income by $14 billion
• Increased per capita income by $200
• Increased jobs by more than 100,000

For cement makers, better energy efficiency and smoother production processes should save money, the state says.

Industry-wide, California expects cement plants to save $3.4 million annually, spread over the next 12 years.

Diane Bailey, a research scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said global warming is only part of the story. With cement production comes other pollutants besides, especially mercury.

“There’s more pressure than AB32 for kilns to clean up,” Bailey said, pointing to a plant in Riverside being sued for chromium contamination. In Davenport, north of Santa Cruz, a Cemex-owned plant shut down earlier this month when the same toxin was detected in its exhaust.

For data visualization of the graph below go here.

Emissions by sector in California

Bailey would like to see cement plants switch to natural gas, a wish common among environmental groups and universally dismissed by the industry. Tollstrup, the state official, said it’s probably not practical, anyway. The infrastructure just isn’t there.

“A lot of these facilities are located where they don’t have access to natural gas,” Tollstrup said. “You’ve got to bring in the fuel from somewhere else.”

Use less cement

From the state’s perspective, there’s only so much that can be done to reduce cement’s carbon footprint. Roads and bridges built over the next decade may simply have to find alternative ways to make concrete.

Tom Pyle, an engineer with CalTrans, deals with such issues every day.

When CalTrans builds a bridge, he explained, it’s primary concerns are safety, structural longevity and cost. Solving global warming isn’t the agency’s goal (though Pyle counts himself an environmentalist). What he and other concerned builders have been trying lately is something that addresses both issues

In large scale projects, Pyle said, a common problem is alkali-silica reactivity, essentially rust that eats away at the strength of concrete. For a building, it’s a cancer

“One way to stop it is to put fly ash in,” Pyle said. “From an engineering point of view, it’s a medicine that stops this cancer.”

Fly ash is a byproduct of burning coal, so it’s not entirely clean, but many see it as a step toward cleaner building materials.

“We’re fortunate in that we don’t have to create anything new,” Pyle said. “We already have a product in our toolbox we can use to make concrete, and in fact protect the concrete, and in fact reduce the CO2.”

Statewide, Pyle estimates, most projects will only replace five to eight percent of cement with slag, fly ash or other materials, but those numbers are creeping up. And Pyle now has a grand example he can point to when pushing other engineers to build cleaner: the Bay Bridge.

The columns holding up the rebuilt span, parts of which collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, use a cement made from 50 percent steel slag. Underwater, the cement is 60 percent fly ash.

“We did it for engineering reasons,” Pyle said. “We can also do it for environmental reasons throughout the state, and that’s where we are headed.”

Where the state would like to reduce the amount of cement used, the industry is trying to offset its damages.

At the Permanente plant, there is talk using the kiln’s leftover heat to generate electricity, something happening in other parts of the world, but which no other facility in California does.

“Back in the 40s, most cement plants created their own power, only because we didn’t have a stable utility sector,” Shane K. Alesi, a Heidelberg executive, said.

O’Hare, of the Portland Cement Association, said his organization is working with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to expand the use of concrete in home construction, which can save on heating bills.

“If taken to its full extent and applied, we expect the development of a model which could be used by urban planning communities in the future to minimize their climate footprint.”

That’s something Pyle, of CalTrans, sees as well.

“I believe the cement industry is seeing opportunity,” the engineer said. “As our world starts to change, we’re going to start to look for sustainability. To me, as a concrete geeky kind of engineer, sustainability means bulding things that are going to last more than a generation. And for CalTrans, what we’re looking at is extending life of our roads and bridges.

It’s hard to predict where the cement industry will be in 12 years. Emissions will probably be lower. If the state’s plan works out, those greenhouse gases will be gone, not just displaced.

Marvin E. Howell, director of land use planning at Hanson Aggregates (now also part of Heidelberg), said the big changes won’t occur at cement plants. Instead, AB 32 is “going to mean changes in how people use the product.”

“Everybody is going to have to change,” Howell said. “It’s not just us.”

Tollstrup, the regulator, paints the most optimistic picture of the industry in 2020:

“I expect that the facilities in California will be the most efficient in the world,” he said. “They’re just going to be ultra clean facilities by the we get to the end game here.”

HAYWARD — With quiet vows and an eye toward November’s Proposition 8 referendum, Stephanie Sue Spencer and the Rev. Arlene Nehring made their 16-year union a legal California marriage in Hayward’s Eden United Church of Christ, where Nehring presides as pastor.

This “much-awaited day” wasn’t quite the wedding they’d hoped for, but with voters going to the polls in a month in an election that could make their union unconstitutional, the couple felt it was better now than never.

“People are hedging their bets,” said Todd Bove, a member of the church who married his partner of 10 years just a month ago.

Proposition 8 would cement the definition of marriage in California’s constitution as a union between one man and one woman, overturning a state Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex unions earlier this year.

There is reason for gay and lesbian couples to be nervous here: Polls have remained close since Proposition 8 earned its spot on the ballot, and a SurveyUSA poll released last week showed the measure supported by 47 percent of respondents, compared with 42 percent opposing. The ceremony and its participants made no effort to duck the political questions that surround the union.

“Stephanie and Arlene have lived a 16-year loving relationship, a relationship tested by fires many could not survive,” Ann Feaver, a longtime friend of the couple, said from the pulpit.

“Sixteen years ago, Stephanie and Arlene had only pockets of tolerance where their love could flourish. They could share their growing friendship, their growing affection, their love, their devotion with some, but not with others. And yet they prevailed.”

The Rev. Wendy Taylor, who presided over the ceremony, added in her opening homily: “This marriage is being entered into neither as a beginning or an end. It is rather an expression of commitment already begun and will continue into the future.”

In her reception toast, Kate Spencer, Stephanie’s younger sister, recalled sitting in a bar 16 years ago, hearing about her sister’s partner.

“Does this mean I have to become an activist now?” she asked at the time. “Sixteen years later, I am proud to be an activist against Prop. 8.”

Spencer and Nehring met two decades ago while studying in Boston, and four years later made a personal commitment to each other.

“Even though I had married many, many couples, we were not part of a church where I could get married to Stephanie,” Nehring said. “And I don’t know that any of our families would have been there.

“Sixteen years ago there were just the two of us. No family, no church. Just us — and Jesus.”

Saturday, a packed sanctuary welcomed the couple into legal marriage.

Taylor read the final pronouncement of marriage, “By the power vested in me,” pausing, she continued, “and by the state of California,” and a cheer went through the sanctuary as she pronounced the women “spouses for life.”

This is only a drill, but an important one.

Across Alameda County, tactical teams from 25 law enforcement agencies are going through 48 hours of simulated disasters, terrorist attacks, riots and jail breaks, from 6 a.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Monday. In all, 1,700 people are involved in making look real a long list of answers to the question: What’s the worst that could happen?

Urban Shield, as the training exercise is known, is in its second year. It builds off law enforcement experience from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and 1991 Oakland hills fire.

“It’s been 17 years since those,” Sgt. JD Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said. “We have people in our department who were in kindergarten when that happened.”

He added: “Unless you operate all your gear and test all your people, you don’t know how they’ll perform when the real thing happens.”

At Cal State East Bay, deputies from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office are running the dignitary protection scenario. Every agency team will do this, with the same threats, and each team is scored. The overall operation aims to find the best practices, and to make sure every agency knows what worked and what didn’t.

The Santa Clara team has been briefed and is prepared to secure the speaker’s location, but a gas leak forces a last minute venue change. Now, Dr. X, as the stand-in dignitary is known, will speak in the open plaza outside Meiklejohn Hall.

There’s no standard solution to this puzzle. Every agency handles it in a different manner, some better than others. In the first five run-throughs, Dr. X was shot once, in the back. A bystander took another hit by accident. Everything is a lesson here.

When the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office team comes in, there is a smattering of applause and chants of “USA! USA!” A Doobie Brothers’ song is playing. Deputies sweep the area and the speaker approaches the podium.

A flash-bang grenade detonates. Students flatten themselves on the pavement, and members of the tactical team push Dr. X — the pill, as they call her — to the ground. Other deputies branch out as shots erupt from two sides of the plaza.

The flash-bang pulled everyone’s attention away from the two shooters. “Every team is turning around and looking at the bang,” Sgt. Chris Hummel, a tactical evaluator from the Fremont Police Department, will say later in debriefing.

The Santa Clara deputies neutralize the shooter to their left, then the one on the right. Later, the Alameda deputy acting as a would-be assassin will show off the bright-pink splash of paint on his helmet front, where a deputy’s simulated bullet hit him.

As the team backs out of the plaza, with two shooters down and Dr. X still standing, a safety officer ends the exercise. Just before he does so, the right-side shooter flinches and a deputy shouts at him: “Stay down or I’ll put another one in your head.”

This map was part of a larger project on Chinese real estate. I built it in Zeemaps using data organized in and imported from a Google spreadsheet. The interactive version is available here.

“I’ll play the blues for you,” he sings, and he delivers on the promise.

The sound comes from the Mississippi Delta, translated and augmented on its way to the West Coast, to Russell City, where a new blues emerged.

Playing in front of Hayward City Hall on Saturday, Williams captures the endpoints of a musical journey espoused by the annual Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival.

“West Coast music is mutt music,” Ronnie Stewart, founder of the Bay Area Blues Society, explains. “It’s a mixture of everything.”

That bloodline includes Mississippi — along with Arkansas and Texas, and Chicago and Los Angeles.

“The rawness of Russell City music…that’s definitely Mississippi,” Stewart says. The rawness is “that real down-home, that real strong rhythm, that real simplicity, 1-4-5 every single song.”

Russell City was a gathering point. It was not a city, but an unincorporated district of Alameda County, now part of Hayward, where music and venues were unrestrained.

“Russell City was a mixture, because the African Americans came from Mississippi, came from Arkansas, came from Texas…and they all got together on the West Coast before they went on to their maritime jobs,” Stewart says. “This was during the ’40s, when West Coast blues was still getting its shape.”

Clubs in that era were basic: “Dirt floors and broken electricity. Amps buzzing, so if you touched the wrong thing, maybe you get grounded,” Stewart says. “No health inspectors, no city inspectors, no nothin’. Just the good, raw blues.”

Williams came out from Mississippi to play in Hayward. The blues are everywhere, he said. The music brings people together, and he sees more resemblance in the sounds of Russell City than the stylistic differences Stewart describes.

“I’ve heard blues in China. I’ve heard blues in Australia. Everybody’s trying to keep it as traditional as possible,” he says. “The blues is bringing us together all the time.”

Russell Kidd, selling T-shirts on Saturday, also feels that connection.

Watching Williams wail on stage, he muses on the music: “It reminds me of the suffering they went through in their early years,” Kidd says. “You can still hear that sound. It reminds me of the suffering I go through in my own life. When you put it to music, it makes you feel good. That means it gives you hope.”

The Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival will continue from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today. The lineup includes Zac Harmon, Johnny Rawls, Vasti Johnson, Mississippi Bo, Harmonica Blues Explosion and Stars of Glory.

Production notes: I tried to keep this video simple: What is West Coast Blues? What does it sound like? Text could give more detail on the history, but I wanted sound to be part of this. I used the newspaper’s Canon camcorder (including a tripod and shotgun mic), and edited in iMovie. It’s still not as polished as I’d like, but I’m more comfortable with the medium now, and editing is getting faster.

Read it in the East Bay Express here.

James Buck is famous on Twitter. The photojournalist and UC Berkeley graduate student used the messaging service to text “Arrested” as Egyptian police took him into custody on April 10, and after a flood of media coverage, he was released the next day. But Buck would like a different name remembered: Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, his 23-year-old interpreter, who was taken at the same time.

Maree may still be in prison. The veterinary student has been held in a high-security facility called Borg al Arab outside Alexandria since his arrest two months ago, and while local news reports say he may be freed soon, neither Buck nor aid workers in his case could be certain. Maree has been tortured, Buck and others allege. According to his family and Human Rights Watch, he has gone on a hunger strike and been put in solitary confinement. Agents of the interior ministry have allegedly threatened the family, saying that Maree will never be released, even though no charges have officially been filed. Other organizers of the April protests have gotten out, but Maree, for a time, was simply lost in the system.

In the two months since his arrest, Buck has bent his journalistic efforts toward freeing Maree. His personal web site tracks the campaign’s progress and lists ways to help. Buck is now trying to build a global alert system using Twitter to quickly spread the word when others are taken.

Buck went to Egypt to finish a master’s thesis in journalism. He extended his stay into April to cover a labor strike in Mahalla, where textile workers were demanding higher wages and protesting rising inflation. Security forces infiltrated the crowd. When protesters pushed him and Maree into a cab to flee, police stopped the car, telling the driver Buck was CIA.

“It was kidnapping, basically,” he said of his arrest. “It’s a tool of any dictatorship. In order to stay in power when nobody’s elected you and nobody likes you, that’s what you have to do.” And this is where Buck stops being polite and starts sounding like an activist, even though everything he says about Egypt, America, and the complicated relationship between them is true. “We give them millions of dollars a year to fund their military dictatorship government so they can arrest and abuse and rape their people,” he said. “It’s farcical to pretend we’re promoting democracy in the Middle East and pay Mubarak’s government to do what they do.”

Indeed, Mubarak’s regime has a well-documented history of abusing Egypt’s people and its press. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based press freedom group, ranks the country 146th in terms of press freedom. The US gives about $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt annually, and the US Agency for International Development gave the country $25 billion between 1975 and 2002, according to the state department.

“People have accused me of not being objective and of being an activist because I’m willing to say these things,” Buck said in a phone interview. “I don’t think that’s bad journalism. I hope that’s good journalism.”

Buck knew Egypt’s human rights record going in. He had spent two years studying the country’s media and had previously made several trips to the Middle East.

“I’d interviewed people who’d told me about being arrested, being tortured in prison, being raped in prison,” he said. “I knew that there were cell phone videos circulated of police raping people in prison.” Still, his attitude before April 10 was essentially, “Bring it on.”

“I knew these things happened, but it was obviously very different when it happened to me. And I certainly didn’t get the worst of it. My treatment was pretty good comparatively.”

Buck’s misadventure in Mahalla was widely reported. Upon being taken into custody, he twittered “Arrested” from his cell phone, which caught the attention of media, diplomats, and activists in the region. He was released shortly thereafter.

“James did everything right pretty much,” said Bill van Esveld, a fellow with Human Rights Watch based in Jerusalem. “He was plugged in. He had a network to fall back on.”

What Buck would like to do is formalize that process, build a network of emergency numbers and listening posts, so when the next journalist, blogger, or activist disappears, the same response will follow.

Right now, van Esveld says, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs rely on frequent phone check-ins when their people are in hot zones. If someone stops calling, it’s time to worry. If that person can shoot off a text message, relayed around the world, van Esveld believes he could get them to safety faster. “It’s good for us. It’s like more rapid-fire, and we can put the pressure on more quickly.”

Egypt is a test case for the idea, van Esveld added.

“Egypt is a really interesting phenomenon. People are getting more and more tech-savvy and government hasn’t figured out what to do about it yet,” he said. The country has a hyperactive blogosphere, and so far, there isn’t the widespread blocking of sites seen in China or Iran.

“It’s giving people a freedom of expression that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” van Esveld said.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed in an e-mail that he had lunch with Buck a few weeks ago and discussed the idea, although the San Francisco-based start-up isn’t actively building anything for Buck.

“Folks in Egypt and other places are already using Twitter as global alert system–a kind of newswire,” he wrote. “We see Twitter as a global communication utility supporting many different uses.”

Egypt is one of Twitter’s hot spots. The country ranks twelfth internationally in SMS traffic, Stone said. Web traffic is far lower, though, a tribute to the proliferation of cell phones and the slow penetration of Internet access.

Similar networks exist using different technology. The American Red Cross maintains a “Safe and Secure” site where disaster victims can post messages letting family and friends know they’re alright.

Click here to view a multimedia slide show of photographs narrated by James Buck.