Netting the US terrorist attacks 

When terrorist attacks reduced symbols of American prestige to rubble, and even before analysts could account for its ramifications on Insurance and Airline industries, reports poured in about the frantic traffic on the Internet. 

The Internet proved its worth once again! 

While a friend of mine admitted to have first got the news of the WTC explosion on the Internet minutes after it began to collapse,
another said that she immediately sent mail to all her relatives in the US to inquire about their safety in the event of the explosions. Yes, at that time of crisis, the Internet helped people connect with each other and communicate their anxiety, pain and loss. A recent survey of Net cafes in India reported that since the US attacks, surfers are now logging into more serious and newsworthy sites. New chat rooms have emerged and are in much demand - Hands Against Terror, Indo-US Friendship, Indo-Israel Comradeship.

Portals threw open their windows to help. MSN and Yahoo! were overflowing (and still are) with news reports, complete with photographs and video clips, about the explosions and its aftermath. Infact, it has been reported that in places where TV coverage was unavailable, even people with little or no prior exposure to video were following the news on their desktops.

And now online video service is poised to become a major competitor to traditional and mainstream broadcasting media. The MSNBC site served over 12.5 million video feeds on 11 September -- 10 times the total for the most-watched day when a powerful earthquake struck Seattle on 28 February. Yahoo's news site, which compiles video material from sources including Reuters, said it had to add servers to handle the additional demand for streaming video on 11 September. 

America's major news channel CNN's website, splashed in Stars and Stripes, bore an imposing slogan: America Under Attack, which moments later became the cliche (at times modified) that was touted by every portal that was reporting the news of the WTC attacks. List of victims, emergency and relief information was flashed across the various sites. 

Instantly, the Internet became a vehicle for the world to make donations. Amazon.com, the massive e-tailer, replaced its storefront window with a link for customers to donate. And by 14 September, contributions topped $ 5 million at amazon.com. An Amazon.com spokesperson is reported to have said that on 14 September morning, the site was averaging $ 150,000 per hour in contributions. The United Way of New York City and the New York Trust together had raised, as of 14 September, $ 60 million, of which 12,000 pledges were made via the Internet totaling $ 1.4 million. On 11 September, the American Red Cross received the most number of online donations in its history--one per second--totaling more than $ 1 million in 12 hours. And by 14 September, Internet users had donated $ 9.2 million to the American Red Cross. By 14 September, Yahoo! and AOL touched $ 240,000 and $ 6 million respectively.

Most of the sites reporting the terrorist attacks in US carried editorial content on various topics, particularly, on technology and the Internet in relation to terrorism. While some writers took the opportunity to nail down those trying to make a fast buck out of other peoples agony, there were others wrote on the limitations of technology when terrorists use airplanes are missiles to attack a nation. There was also this interesting article on the Net on how terrorists could possibly use computer games, downloaded from the Net, to learn flying without much training. 

At the other side of the rainbow are the sites that cry 'jihad'. Any surfer flipping through webpages to get more news about the terrorist attacks on US would have, at some point in time, been curious to see what the Islamic sites had to say. A Google search came up with an astounding number of 2,38,000 Islamic sites. When the search was narrowed down to Jihad sites, the number was still at a high of 27,000, about 40 of which were nestled in Yahoo! Webring. The interesting ones, like
www.taliban.com, www.ummah.com,
www.afghanistan.ie.com and the Al-Qaida webpage were out of commission. The sites that could be accessed proved interesting, like the Harkat-ul-mujahideen website which has a Chat facility.

And as the United States of America prepares to go to war with Afghanistan, the Internet will be a major resource to track the strategic moves taken on either sides of the battlefield. What's more, on the Internet, you can even have your say and be sure that it is heard across the world.