Last month we wrote about our experience working on the Slidell Hurricane Disaster Blog in a post titled, “Looking Back: Hurricane Katrina Blogging.” The blog was in a serious state of disrepair having remained dormant with no new posts since April and thousands of comment and trackback spam links. We took down the blog assuming it had, “outlived its usefulness as a resource.” We were wrong. The emails, phone calls, blog posts and IMs kept coming in such as, “you have broken the internet!” and “you dishonor the dead!” and many other messages that we choose not to repeat. Even Mike Arrington got in on the action.

We can take a hint and restored the blog earlier today. Had we realized how many people had a specific interest in the blog we would have never taken it down. Instead we might have invested more resources to keep it relevant. Over the next few weeks we plan to reinvent the blog, while honoring the effort previously made by the team.

For those of you living throughout the Gulf (or elsewhere) who want to be part of the team to develop and maintain a resource for past and future hurricane victims please contact Alexander Muse at 214.550.2003 and let us know how you can help. We need citizen reporters to help with the effort. Again, please accept our apology for our shortsightedness.

The Guardian is reporting that, according to Alexa, YouTube generates 3.9% of global internet traffic compared to MySpace’s 3.4%. Nielsen has indicated traffic has grown 297% in the last six months. During that same period MySpace’s growth has slowed to 9%.

I first used YouTube one year ago when I uploaded my first video on August 9th. I wrote about the service in a post titled “Social video sharing service – YouTube!” I created several videos just to try out the service including very boring moments like “Driving from Wendy’s to Home!“, or classics like “Vegas Forum Trip“, and of course Ethan’s “Batman Birthday Party.” I even tried to use the forum to communicate with potential clients like Ikea with this classic, “Weblogs Work for IKEA!” I even documented the 2005 Web 2.0 conference in a very borning video titled, “Web 2.0 Conference.” The “Driving from Wendy’s” video even appeared on NPR shortly after I posted it. They used it as an example of the useless stuff on YouTube.