I have previously described the Boston Police Department’s Weblog as not being particularly blog-like, as I have come to understand the term. The posts are written in standard police report format with accordingly often stiff phrasing and awkward construction: "A registration check revealed that the vehicle license plate had been reported stolen." — What was stolen? The license plate, or the car? "…the officer discontinued following the suspect vehicle. " Discontinued?
I have also noted that the information contained in the blog is nowhere near as searchable — and consequently only a fraction as useful — as that provided by the Chicago Police Department and collected, sorted, collated and merged with Google mapping software by Adrian Holovaty on his site chicagocrime.org.
However, after a little time spent this morning cruising the BPD blog, my respect and appreciation have increased. I’m also impressed.
In an entry posted on Sept. 25, the BPD seeks the public’s help in identifying a woman whose partially decomposed body was found last year in a chimney. To this end, the BPD has inserted a video taken from YouTube. The video is of a digital reconstruction of the woman, showing what she might have looked like before she died.
I tried the video and it didn’t work. That could have been due to the age and decrepitude of the computer on which I’m composing this. However, the BPD anticipated this possibility and included below the video a link to a PDF file of still photos.
At the bottom of the entry are other links: to a PDF document with photos and identifying details; to the America’s Most Wanted page on this case (it was profiled on that show in mid-September); and to another bpdnews.com post asking for help in identifying a body found on Causeway Street (Boston) in early June.
These are the moments when I am awed by the people-connecting power of the Internet/World Wide Web.
These are the moments when I am awed by the potential power of tens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of strangers contributing their small part to work towards a whole that is much greater than anyone can envision.
And the truly stunning element of this is that most of those people will probably never know the extent of their contributions. Will never know how many lives they affect or touch.
It is, indeed, the ultimate web. (Especially once the world of the Web reaches at last the few billion "un-connected" people. Although whether that will be an unequivocally good thing is debatable — but that’s a whole other discussion…)
