MIT Magazine has a great piece on Blogs and Hurricane Katrina. It points to a variety of sites covering the disaster.

Barnett’s blog, The Interdictor, had previously been a "private little journal," according to Barnett. But when he began chronicling Katrina’s destruction and the terrible aftermath, it became a lot more.

Currently, tens of thousands of readers a day visit it. "I get thousands of instant messages an hour, I can’t keep up with them," he writes in the blog. Barnett’s blog is just one of tens of thousands of blogs covering Katrina’s aftermath…

Then there is this terrific quote from Clay Shirky: "The so-called ‘memory hole’ that many politicians of all stripes have relied upon is now closed," says Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor of interactive telecommunications at NYU. "The blogosphere has become the institutional memory for the country."

As Eric says: "Blogs have made a leap toward legitimacy: a story is now a story whether it originates on a blog or on CNN. The medium is no longer the message. The message, in fact, is now the message."