The South-East Asian Earthquake and Tsunami Blog (or SEA-EAT Blog, as it came to be known) was started on 27th December 2004, the day after the earthquake and tsunami.

I am a regular blogger, and had started or participated in a few online communities. I set up the blog, and then began inviting bloggers I knew to help me, telling them in turn to invite more people. This helped us to post information around the clock, since the group had now spread across time zones and geographical boundaries.

As the numbers grew to over 200 volunteers, we began self-organizing into volunteer groups of specialists—some set up the wiki, others concentrated on design, others created sub-blogs to filter information, others worked on translation, others began work on a database. This in turn helped the project grow from the main blog into several subsites and a wiki-based site as well. The core team coordinated the efforts of the others, while contributing to the informationgathering effort. The people participating in the project covered a wide range of nationalities, locations and cultures. The only common factors were familiarity with the use of the Internet and blogging tools, and a desire to help.

The blogs and the wiki are still attracting more than a thousand visitors a day. (At peak, during the first ten days after the disaster, visitor numbers were over 100,000 a day.) These figures can be attested by referring to the third party counter on the sites.

This was truly a world-wide effort, by citizens of the world, for citizens of the world. The objective of the project was to provide information in a calm, unbiased way. We made it clear that we had nothing to gain, that we were not personally collecting or earning money for our efforts. We were, as experienced bloggers and Internet users, more familiar with the ways to search for and disseminate information than the average net user. We evolved into the most comprehensive clearing house of information on the subject.