I replied to Robert Scoble on his post about the quake.

 

Hi Robert,

 

I'm from Sri Lanka and can give you a better perspective from where we stand. Blogging in this part of the world (in Sri Lanka to be more precise) is a rare sight. The number of Sri Lankan bloggers is well below 30 (although MSN Spaces seems to be slowly changing this) and beating the mainstream press to a story is not even on our minds.

 

Of this less than 30 bloggers, the chances of any of them blogging their first hand experience is remote as none of us would have experienced this first hand. Even if we had experienced it first hand we would have had more pressing work to help out in the relief efforts (as I was doing yesterday) than blog about it.

 

Another notable thing is that most of the areas that were affected had all their communications infrastructure wiped off. Even the mainstream media did not have video coverage till very late in the evening (the tragedy occured on Sunday morning).

 

Although your choice of words might not have been appropriate for this post, I appreciate you linking to the Red Cross and other stories of people helping out. There has been an outpouring of Sri Lankans helping out the affected victims by donating clothing, food, cash, volunteering etc.

 

Your readers could help us out in a bigger way than you could imagine and even the smallest contribution of a single dollar goes a long way in helping the people in Sri Lanka and the affected countries.

 

And to Microsoft's credit, I learnt from my MVP Lead, Howard Lo that Microsoft Sri Lanka is already helping out with donations.

 

A humble request that I would like to make from Microsoft employees (maybe someone is already doing this) would be to start an employee fund and donate that to the Red Cross.

 

Thank you,

Merill