Tsunami followup:
Steve Outing's column at Poynter this week, Taking Tsunami Coverage into Their Own Hands, discusses the southeast Asian tsunami as a turning point in citizen journalism. We've had a few turning points now. But Outing, with the help of Dan Gillmor, makes a persuasive case here that blogging and Web news will never be the same, and hopes that the MainStreamMedia will learn from it:

"But let's not just let the historians benefit. Mainstream news organizations should consider the tsunami story as the seminal marker for introducing citizen journalism into the hallowed space that is professional journalism."
....(but) Among most of the largest U.S. news websites, there's scant indication of the citizen-journalism opportunity, alas. NYTimes.com includes nothing close to what BBC News Online offers, other than a public discussion forum. The same goes for WashingtonPost.com, LATimes.com, AJC.com (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), and others.
...While some bloggers have done such a tsunami-news aggregation, no one has yet caught it all. A news organization with the resources, brand credibility, and audience reach probably could do a more thorough job.

There's a huge desire for this. Note the reactions to the Wikipedia entries, the home video hosting sites. Yesterday news librarians were appealing on the listserv for more better news/links aggregations. Although there are lots out there, we want more. We want one great site that links to everything. Where is it?

Since I've teased you with the librarians' request, here are the sites they recommended:

• University of Buffalo libraries' Indian Ocean Disaster resources.
  
• Discovery Channel's links.
  
• BBC, CNN, USGS, NOAA.
  
• David Shedden's earthquake links at Poynter.
  
• Tsunami lecture at U. of Pittsburgh.
  
• "Dr. Web" has been posting links on his blog.
  
• I recommended The Guardian's superb report and, of course, the SEA-AT blog and SAJA's journalist resource page, as well as Wikipedia's entries.
  
• I've posted lots more links over the last week on my Herald blog.

But I don't think any of these really fits the bill of the kind of site Outing is imagining. WikiNews' news page on the tsunami may be the closest thing to a true news aggregator. I'd like to think Topix would do a good job,but they cover only U.S. sources, fine for some use though; lately I've been disappointed in their local news offerings so wonder what's going on there.