I was tweaking my blog today, (which I have embedded in my travel site). I was pleased that I had successfully been able to add a button which allows visitors to tweet my blog whenever they see something they might wish to pass on. (I already have a widget within the blog that shows latest tweets of mine, and blog posts are automatically set up to be sent as twitter alerts.)
I posted a blog about whaleshark interaction tours in the Bicol region of the Philippines, as a friend of mine there, who runs the aforementioned tours, had just emailed me, and this had brought the subject to mind.
Just an hour or so later, I picked up a tweet from someone to say that the lava plug on Mt Mayon, in that same Bicol region, was bulging. I then received another tweet, from a totally different source, which said that there had been small "quakes" around the mountain, and that an eruption was predicted.
Straight away, I sent a general tweet out myself, to say that I had reason to believe an eruption was imminent. (My tweets go out, via tweetdeck, to my facebook account, as well as twitter, and within seconds I had a pal in Manila, who is in the tourism industry, responding to me.)
I had, by then, emailed my friend in the Bicol region, who assured me that this "activity" of the mountain, was fairly normal. (I already knew that it is anything but dormant), but she did confirm that the government was advising those living in the shadow of Mt Mayon to move away as a precaution!
With this, I was immediately able to tweet my newly acquired, up-to-the-minute information via twitter, and also over facebook; and various contacts of mine were responding positively to my missive almost before the ink was dry on the tweet, so to speak.
What an amazing world we live in.
