Now, Jeffrey Young over at the CHE Tech blog is reporting on projects that look to integrate platforms like FB with emergency response notification systems for college campuses. One project underway is over at the University of Maryland and is being headed up by HCI visionaries, Ben Shneiderman (Designing the User Interface) and Jenny Preece (Interaction Design; Beyond HCI). Young does a nice job of including those with concerns about how such a system might be abused (e.g., false alarms) as well as those touting its advantages, but the detail that stood out most to me was the description of a former New Orleans resident (now a student at UCLA), who explained that when Katrina hit, she was going to social networking arenas like Facebook for information because the cellphone networks were useless.