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Technorati traffic surged to nearly one and a half million posts a day as thousands of new blog readers searched for more information.

Major blogs like DailyKos played a big role in organizing that online response.  Looking back at the tragedy, Stephen DarkSyde remembered how his DailyKos readers banded together: "That was the really amazing thing from my perspective--the human angle, our community in action."

Stephen DarkSyde describes the disaster in a new book of DailyKos science essays entitled Kosmos: You Are Here. This week, he's the focus of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions.  In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
Towards the end of Kosmos, you give a suspenseful and heartbreaking first-person look at the experience of tracking Hurricane Katrina.  How was your reporting different? How can the blogosphere help scientists and science writers interact with natural disasters?

Stephen DarkSyde:
I live in Florida, so I pay attention to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) site, and hurricane activity in general...

My reporting may have been a little different because blogging allows two-way interaction in real time. By reading comments and staying on top of e-mails, I was able to quickly find more information on pretty much anything I needed and post it—they act as a muse of sorts.

Early on I ran across a blog called The Weather Underground and wrote the bloggers there. One of them, Steve Gregory, wrote me back and I guess I convinced him I could reach a larger audience. This was on Saturday morning. Although the media was starting to pick up the story, they still didn't seem to understand what was coming down on the gulf coast.

Anyone with half a brain, Internet access, and the most ultra-basic knowledge of cyclonic storms could clearly look at the freely available sat data and ask a storm expert to help them understand the nuances—this storm was going to track over tepid water and get supercharged to catastrophic status right before drifting over the gulf coast.

This storm was going to plow the ground like a fifty mile wide F-5 tornado with a tsunami attached. It happened to be tracking dead into New Orleans--the worst place on the gulf it could possibly make landfall. Then it would wander up the Mississippi Valley and wreck structures well inland for hundreds of miles as it spawned floods and tornados.  

I couldn't believe every resource in the nation wasn't being thrown into that threat. I couldn't believe Bush wasn't on TV knocking heads to get the lead out and evacuate people. Helicopters, Humvees, convoys of boats and private vehicles and military trucks could have gotten a lot of people out of there.

My horror only grew as the storm gathered momentum and drew closer. In between blogging it I was reading how the wetlands reconstruction had been unfunded, how the levee projects were being drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub. Everyone helping me on Daily Kos in comments could see it too. The picture was starkly unsubtle.