I knew phone communications would be down after Ike (we have no landline, only cell), so I set up my cellphone to send txt messages to my Twitter, then sent my Twitter page to my family and friends so they could keep up with how we were doing during and after the hurricane. I also set up a plugin on my WordPress blog that connected it with my Twitter account, so that anything that appeared on my Twitter would also appear on my blog.

We lost cell voice communications before losing power, so I was able to blog for a while, but once power was lost, I was only able to communicate to the outside by texting to my Twitter acct, which double posted to my Twitter and blog. I haven't txt'd to Twitter since Ike.



If was in a remote area that didn't have voice, I'd certainly try txt'ing for help. But if I was going to txt to Twitter, I'd use #hashmarks in front of my keywords (e.g. #mayday #emergency #accident #help) so they wouldn't get lost in all the "drama queen" tweets. I've been hoping to get a ham license, but had difficulties with a few areas of study. But for life-threatening accidents, I think ham would be much better than Tweeting for help. I don't know if ham would have helped with the ski tragedy though.
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An interesting side note: Once I returned online, my chess mentor told me he read about my tweets in two articles of his local newspaper. I searched his online paper and found they reported about us bartering coffee made on the campstove with a stovetop percolator, and charging our neighbors cellphones via car battery/inverter (some didn't have a car charger cable!) in exchange for ice, and one young neighbor mowed our front yard once we removed all the branches.

edit: clarification