Using Twitter you can send short, focused pieces of information to a group of people instantly.
 
Does that sound useful in an emergency?
 
In recent disasters, Twitter has quickly proven to be a key communications conduit for both personal accounts of the disaster and official news. Why?

Dave Petley at Dave's Landslide Blog has a great slidedeck discussing the Wanchai earthquake earlier in 2008.  Which building types performed well, which did not.  How did rescue operations compare to previous earthquakes.  What lessons can be taken away.
As always, excellent work by Dr. Petley.

OK, maybe I didn’t learn these things at IAEM, but there were a number of themes that kept repeating themselves at the conference that really struck home with me.  As Capt.

Just returned from the International Assn of Emergency Managers Conference in Kansas City where Depiction Version 1.0 was rolled out and unveiled to the public.  Our booth was awesome (watch for the pics on our website soon), and so was the response to Depiction software.  Everyone who invested a few minutes to see just some of what Depiction can do was impressed - and when they found out it costs only $89, they were VERY impressed.  Many folks signed up on the spot to download the two week Free Trial version.  The best part of the conference was the chance to

In case you happen to be in Kansas City at the 56th Annual IAEM Conference please stop by and see us at the Depiction booth.  You can't miss us, we are under the BIG hanging globe.  During the conference we are giving away free trial copies of Depiction.  The reception to Depiction's roll out has been great.  Its been very busy and we have been having a great time talking to emergency management professionals from all over the world.  If you have already talked to us, thanks.  We look forward to working with you in the future.

Hi I am Bill " The Fire Guy". I joined Depiction a little over a year ago. I am a career firefighter in the greater puget sound area. I was asked to join Depiction to provide the perspective of the first reponder community and how our software might make their jobs easier. I look forward to visiting with you more in the future. Stay tuned, more to follow...

I have received a number of questions from users regarding using Depiction in conjunction with their in-house GIS resources.  Most users know that Depiction can directly import shapefiles which makes accessing your GIS data quick and easy.  However, what many users do not know is that you can also move your Depiction elements back into ArcGIS.  The mechanism for doing this is a .GML file.