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All humor aside, New England is in the cross-hairs of a major storm today.

Social Media is hopping with updates and statuses:

#MA Storm:I-90 speed reduced to 40mph, Exits 1 to 6.

— Mass. Transportation (@MassDOT) February 8, 2013

Snow has started, #blizzard warning in effect for all #Connecticut – DOT warns people stay of roads. State of Emergency declared, #NEMO

— Pushita Loffreda,EMP (@PKLoffreda) February 8, 2013

In the initial onset of this storm, Amateur Radio may not be needed, but Social Media will be buzzing with information, updates, damage assessment information, and status updates.

For the radio amateur, this is a wonderful opportunity to watch Twitter and see how Social Media works in a disaster such as this. I’m already seeing notifications of shelter locations.

#Winter storms & #blizzards can knock out power. Make sure you have a plan for staying warm if power goes out ready.gov/blackouts

— femaregion5 (@femaregion5) February 8, 2013

This one is a bit on the late side, but FEMA tends to tweet out the same basic messages quite often, in a rotation, so this will have been tweeted out not to long ago, too.

There are several people on Twitter who retweet almost every relevant item that they find. You can follow a couple of these people, and then filter out what you see by further following the users that tweet out what you like to read.

I follow @GetMeOutNews on Twitter. She retweets a bunch of info, all day long.  A lot of it doesn’t pertain to me, but some of it does.  I look at the original senders that she is forwarding from, and sometimes follow them directly for faster updates.

Huh? “Follow,” “tweet,” “retweet?” This week I’ll post a primer on Social Media for Ham Radio operators.  It’s nowhere near as hard to learn as the Q signals and ARL RadioGram numbers.

73 & stay warm,  David