Often self-dubbed “the front page of the Internet,” social media news aggregator is making its bones today for that subtitle as users are using the service as a news corkboard for updates, information and developments after two bombs exploded in Boston, Mass. killing and injuring runners and spectators at the Patriots’ Day marathon. The corkboard threads have been split into multiple sections (first, second, third, fourth [most recent]) due length and continue to update in /r/news.

Google has also released a person finder for Boston Marathon attendees to help families determine where their loved ones might be.

After natural disasters and bombings flurries of news often hit the media in waves as new information comes in. Information in our society both coalesces around sources (such as newspapers and TV stations) but it also scatters via word-of-mouth, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Newspapers and TV work under the premise of getting their own professionals in the field—but social media spins wildly out of control and tends to follow the trends of thought.

What Reddit is doing is concatenating or liveblogging as much news appearing on traditional media and adding together reports from citizen journalists. This produces a corkboard news effect—something that used to appear most often in city centers in the early 20^th century after big disasters where families would put up notices as to missing family members and general news about the event in town squares. The effect here is only amplified greatly by the nature of traditional media, social media, and the Internet.

Reddit volunteers are posting links updating a living liveblog that generates not just a picture of how the world sees the event; but also becomes a tapestry of links leading to resources for people who may have been affected. The Google person finder is only the first of resources to be posted, but Redditors have also linked offers from locals for places to stay for attendees (add yours if you have space); crisis counseling phone numbers 1-800-985-5990; live scanner feeds for around the area on Justin.tv; and tip lines for the FBI and Boston police reaching out on Twitter.

Too big for even Reddit

The response to the Reddit posts has been so tremendous that the website has been forced to put one of the pages into lockdown (read-only) so that it can continue serving the information there.

The human toll of this horrific bombing has struck deep and the aftermath is still unfolding. The Reddit volunteers keeping the threads going continue to post minute-by-minute discoveries of news, details, locations in Boston offering help, and when one volunteer runs out of time/energy they pass it along to another on the website so that more information can be aggregated.

From my far-away place, on the opposite coast, my heart goes out to the victims of this tragic and terrible event and their families.

UPDATE: The Reddit thread added section four; article updated to reflect this.