If you haven’t heard, there was an earthquake. It wasn’t my first earthquake, but it was my first in Missouri.
The quake happened at 4:37 a.m. Friday. Sadly, for me, I was just going to bed. (I’d been working on a blog post, actually.) The first confirmation that it was an earthquake (because I always doubt it for some reason) came from Twitter. I tried the U.S. Geological Service, but they didn’t have anything for at least 30 minutes. And I knew better than to try mainstream media that quick (but I still tried). Weird for me, though, was that I didn’t think of the story and the paper first.
Maybe it’s a sign of growing up (or exhaustion — it was almost 5 a.m.), but when news happens, I used to always think of work first. This time, I looked around, noticed nothing had fallen or broken, and headed back to bed. Then it dawned on me that if other people were finding out about the quake from Twitter, that I should be, you know, Twittering it for @stltoday. So I did.
I got to bed around 8:30 — after a few hours of Twitter updates and creating a map mashup. (Did you see the Chicago Tribune’s mashup? That thing is awesome. I have plans to try to deconstruct it this weekend to see how it all works.) And it looks like those Twitter updates helped drive traffic to stltoday.com. I didn’t think of the mashup right away either though. For someone who’s so gung-ho about new media and the Web, I’m a little worried that I didn’t think of some of these things sooner.
I didn’t feel any of the aftershocks, although some people did feel one around 10; I was asleep by then. It looks like the last aftershock was around 6 — only a 2.7, which definitely wasn’t felt here. (Is it weird that I kinda want another one?)
*Headline courtesy of Valerie. She said it earlier, and I haven’t been able to get the song out of my head since then.