Realtime Web Reports of Crisis in Kenya

#nakumatt_fire is the hashtag being used by citizen reporters to broadcast information about a horrific fire in downtown Nairobi. Even more telling is the following statement from user Frequent on a Kenyan forum: “Have you ever seen a fire hyndrant on the streets of Nairobi?”

As far as I can tell, the only person on the scene reporting is Twitter user Kahenya. Who writes via Twitter…

Doubt there are any survivors. I hope I’m wrong but there does not seem to be any survivors…Gas explosion has shot up 50 feet re-igniting the fire.

A blogger, Moses Kemibaro, writes…

Just got back from the Nairobi city centre where the Nakumatt Down Town branch caught fire sometime this afternoon. A good portion of the city centre is covered in smoke and we could hear the gas cylinders exploding in the fire. The part of the city where Nakumatt Down Town is located had also been cordoned off by the police and many people were standing in the streets trying to get a glipmse of what was happening. There was also a police helicopter circling the city centre and lots of ambulances going in an out of the city centre. I don’t have much information that but it looked very serious from where I was and I hope no one was harmed in the fire.

Where Traditional Search Fails, Twitter Shines

This is perhaps the biggest reason why people are placing so much value in micro-messaging services like Twitter. Before NTV can report from the scene, before Google can cache the results, before people like me can share the information with people like you; other people on the scene using services like Twitter can begin sharing information. This is the emergence of a whole new animal dubbed the Realtime Web. But more on that another day, for now my thoughts are with the victims of this event.