My First Earthquake Experience in M'sia

It was around 6pm+ when I first felt my eyes move in front of me. Nay, it was just my colleague who was probably moving while talking to me. After awhile though, it happened again. It was no joke, we were either giddy or drunk. Second wasn’t an option, so there she was, swaying. I looked around, and suddenly, everything was a double vision.

The ground was moving. We were all moving along. It dawned upon me, that this was none other than an earthquake.

It was truly an experience, but guess what? Twitter was the saviour. As soon as I announced it in my Facebook, and also via my Twitter, I received plenty of responses: that I wasn’t alone. Replies from as far as Port Klang to nearer to

home, Damansara area, came drowning my twitter stream. This all confirmed the fact that we weren’t alone in our building at Wisma Genting, that everyone everywhere, even in Singapore, were all feeling the effects of the tremor.

The more informative ones such as theChannelC, ShaolinTiger and Cerventus went on to scour the news and only then we realized what was happening:

It was a tremor that started in between Padang, Sumatera, and our very own Melaka. The tremor hit 7.6 on the Richter scale, a really high number for the uninitiated.

We were feeling the after shocks that shook our very grounds.

Marcia and I, the media team, decided to cover the event. The raw videos will be submitted to CNN and any other news source I can find tomorrow morning for their use, upon recommendation from someone I know well. Why not? We were there with live footage, my camera equipped and my video camera with her, there was nothing stopping us.

In Twitter, the tweet below got RTed more than 30 times by friends up to 5th degree. So was @nikicheong‘s picture at Menara Star. This shows how powerful live coverage can be, though the picture doesn’t actually show that much. See below:

@spinzer: The scene at Raja Chulan monorail station! Crazy! #klearthquake http://twitpic.com/jpbl9

It was amazing to see some reactions. As you scour the area, you can see some smiling, some pealing with laughters of joy, some worried, some getting or making calls to their loved ones all around, some in utter seriousness, especially to those who need to make sure everyone escaped safely. David Jong here does not leave anything to imagination.

We managed to get some live interviews with some participants, which will come later, we from the CCMYC promise.

As for the aftermath, it was useless to come out to the roads. The scene above was stagnant for a good 30 seconds to 1 minute before moving.

The crawling traffic did nothing to improve the worsening jam in Kuala Lumpur, especially after a noticable break just after Hari Raya period. Marcia and I then proceeded to Estana, where we bantered on the effects of social media tools, on how fast it could disemminate information even before the officials did.

If this was used in a proper manner, most social media evangelists like @BenIsrael and @blogjunkie agreed that we have yet to touch on their true capabilities in a system-wide usage capability, something that can be explored in more detail by relevant bodies. The importance of high efficiency and wide-reaching ability of tools like Facebook and Twitter is something to ponder about.

One such random example I’d like to touch is related to how an online marketing analyst, Franz, uses search terms and hash tags data combined with analytical tool to find out how consumers are speaking on brands, be it bad (#streamyxsucks) or for good (ie Digi_telco receiving lots of praises). Read about his #streamyxsucks research here and you may find more worthy conceptualized data at his blog, which is a must read. I hope this has opened channels for further discussion 🙂

Other posts on this topic: http://me.zestful.org/2009/09/earthquake-tremors-in-kuala-lumpur-malaysia/