Virginia Tech Support (Icons & More)

My cohorts at the AIM BuddyBlog have made 2 new icons for AOL & AIM users, so you can show your support for those affected by the Virginia Tech shootings. They're ribbon icons in the Support and Remembrance category, and their design is based on other online badges and memorials we've seen:

Thanks to Buckyhoo for the heads-up.

(Virginia Tech is one of the few universities we have existing licensing deals with, so we were able to do it quickly.)

Also, since anyone following the news of the Virginia Tech shootings on TV or online has probably already hit saturation point, I just wanted to cover some of the online/social media aspects of the story we've seen today:

* As I mentioned yesterday, AOL has a bunch of folks with Hokie ties. One of them is Ian MacFarlane, a Tech alum who now works at AOL. He had been in a writing class with the Cho Seung-Hi and provided two disturbing plays written by him, as well as his recollections of Cho.

(Cho is the family name. Not sure if he referred to himself in Western style [given name first] or Asian-style [family name first], though all the news reports have the family name first, which is different from what you'd expect for a guy who'd lived in the U.S. for 15 years.)

* The Roanoke Times has an article about how people at Tech and in Blacksburg used online and social media tools, like text messages, cell phone cameras, blogs and online profiles to communicate with others when cellular networks were overloaded. [Link via Fark.com, which is also mentioned in the story]

* Wired's Threat Level bloghas good running roundup of Virginia Tech-related stories (with a technical angle).

* News.com talks about how "Journalists look to bloggers for Virginia Tech story."

Not sure how I feel about this -- a lot of news outlets had messages on their pages asking for people to send in their eyewitness accounts, but posting requests for interviews in the blogs, profiles and groups of people affected by events like this seems a lot like ambulance chasing.

* Al's Morning Meeting also has a roundup with a lot of links talking about how people have been using online social media around the shootings

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: virginia tech shootings, citizen journalism, buddy icons, social media