About

In Case of Emergency is a blog dedicated to exploring public health preparedness efforts in the US. My primary interest is in communication, though I have a great interest in planning for public health emergencies in general. In the past, I have posted on new, or social, media use in disaster situations, crisis communications (or crisis and emergency risk communication, as the CDC calls it), homeland security, public health and open access scholarly journals.

The author has been working in a position for more than a year that will give him a front row seat to these efforts. He writes this blog in order to pontificate on those issues that present themselves in the media, in the blogs, and in his work. Through this effort, perhaps we can all learn a bit more about what works, what doesn’t work, where we are strong and where we need more effort.

This blog is not as prolific as I would like it to be. I generally post every two or three days. If I’m feeling punchy and have a backlog of potential posts, it will be more. If work and family are taking up all of my time, it will be less often.

While I love all of your visits to the website, there is an easier way to get the latest In Case of Emergency goodness without your having to keep stopping by. This can be done by utilizing the RSS feed of this blog. An RSS feed will automatically push any new posts to a program called an “RSS reader.” That basically means that whenever I publish something, it’ll be delivered to your computer for you to read at your leisure. My readers typically use Google Reader, Bloglines, MagpieRSS and NewsGator. If you have a reader, you subscribe to my feed by clicking the blue button labeled “# Readers – by Feedburner” to the right. This will bring up a page describing In Case of Emergency and asking you which program you’d like to use to subscribe with.

I also know that some folks would rather not (or cannot, as IT decides) install new programs. For these folks, I give you In Case of Emergency over email. You can sign up by clicking the button labeled “Via Email.” I do not use, save, sell, give away or otherwise abuse those folks who submit their email address – it’s 100% private.

Please note that this blog is writted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License v3.0. This means that anyone can use, re-use, re-mix, copy, sample or quote in any way – so long as you attribute the work to me, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and agree to license the derivative content under a similar Creative Commons license. This work is in no way copyrighted. All pictures and images, except as noted, are Creative Commons-licensed as well.

You can find more information about this blog by clicking the links at the top of the page. The About link, where you are now, is obviously about the blog and me. Stickers is about stickers that I offer to my readers, and is my primary means of advertisement. I used to have a Resources page and a Blogroll page that listed great websites, articles and software packages that my readers might find of use. I have since moved those resources to my del.icio.us page. Please feel free to visit that page for a ton of things to read, and know that I update it constantly.

Finally, if you do stop by, please be sure to say hi. Readers are encouraged to comment on any post; and are free to email me at the address to the right.

If you’re looking for the rather excellent blog, In Case of Emergency, Read Blog, written by CERT superstar John D. Solomon, we are, unfortunately unaffiliated–though I do enjoy some of his mis-directed traffic.  Please do stop by over there to learn all about his upcoming book.