From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke is off this week. I'm Bob Garfield.

A few days ago, an email came in from a friend in Slovenia,

forwarded from a friend of his in Germany,

originating in how many pass-alongs there's-no-telling from a hospital in Indonesia.

It was a photograph of a two-year-old boy separated from

his parents in the tsunami. A week earlier, a Swedish child had been reunited with his father

following another global email search. One of several ways the internet figured into the tsunami

aftermath more than in any previous natural disaster.

Online billboards were established to exchange information about missing loved ones.

Millions of dollars were raised for relief efforts using online payment services.

Bloggers transmitted up to the second news and video with unprecedented speed.

According to Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 at CNET Networks and noted Internet Guru,

it all marked the convergence of the digital revolution with a tragic twist of fortune.

I think the first thing was how lucky they were that there were all these foreign tourists there.

You had the poor people living in the flatlands on the beach and the rich people living in the hotels on the beach.

And that created a huge tragedy, but also a uniquely favorable condition for the internet getting involved.

It just caught the internet's eye.

Unfortunately, there were no foreign tourists

in Rwanda. There weren't as many foreign tourists in Bosnia. What we saw in fundraising, in news

reporting, in the application of search technology and so forth, were these refinements over how

the internet has been used in the past, or were there some sort of giant leaps forward?

...