Internet Users Can Keep Up With Earthquake News

Computer users connected to the Internet can track updated information on Japan’s devastating earthquake.

The global network of computers is buzzing with photos, eyewitness reports and even a piece of fiction written last year about a gigantic earthquake rocking the Land of the Rising Sun.

Internet users have dozens of ways to get updates from the area of Japan hit by the quake.

While the quake left many residents without electricity and telephones, computer users in other Japanese cities are unaffected and are relaying reports via phone service, satellites and other Internet connections.

Flooded with questions from overseas relatives and friends, Internet users in Japan took shifts at university, business and government computers, sending replies or directing people to help.

Interest in the quake’s aftermath created several new areas on the Internet for such inquiries. Those with access to Usenet groups can find information from sci.geo.earthquakes and from alt.current-events.kobe-quake.

Those with connections to the World Wide Web can track reports and see selected photos at the following:

The Raleigh News and Observer’s Japan site (http://www.nando.net/newsroom/nt.world.html).

A university in Finland with access to Nihon TV’s footage (http://niksula.cs.hut.fi/~haa/kobe/ html).

The home page of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (http://www.ntt.jp/what’s new).

Coincidentally, the Internet spin-off of Wired magazine ran an excerpt from the novel “RIM” this week, a work that describes the “New Nippon Mega-Quake of 2027.”

The novel, by Alexander Besher, was chosen weeks ago to run in excerpted form because of its literary value, said HotWired’s Managing Editor Chip Bayers (HotWired’s address: http:/ /www.hotwired.com).