PDX Boom!

So this is really cool.  First, some background.  Sunday night about 8 p.m. here in the fair city of Portland, 911 started getting reports of a big BOOM! that people had heard.  They kept getting more and more reports, and they seemed to center around the Sellwood area of SE Portland.  No one knew what had happened, but they sure were willing to talk about it.  Within minutes the hash tag #pdxboom had emerged on Twitter.  People were posting their locations and how loud it had been.  A local designer decided to collate all this information into a Google map that people could continue to add to.  Within a few hours hundreds of people had added their info, and a pattern started to emerge.  The most severe reports seemed to stem outwards from a park.  The police went to the park and found a large detonated pipe bomb.  Still no word on who actually dentonated it.

But the cool part is how people and technology came together to solve this little mystery.  I've heard a few of the 911 calls; some people were pretty spooked because it was REALLY loud and even shook some windows.  This is a great example of crowdsourcing, which is kind of a buzz word in business right now, but obviously can be used for other applications as well, ones there more directly serve 'the greater good'.  And of course, this was a great opportunity for the New York Times to continue their love affair with Portland.