Since the Eyjafjallajökull eruption we have been monitoring the use of social media by people who have been trying to get home. We have summarised our findings on our wiki on a new Innovative response to the closing of European airspace page. Some social media services were set up very quickly. Facebook group ‘When Volcanoes Erupt: A Survival Guide for Stranded Travelers‘ was established on 16 April. Twitter was used with the #stranded and #getmehome tags (now apparently no longer being used). Comprehensive Wikipedia articles were set up about the eruption, the air disruption and the aftermath with over 300,000 viewings in the first few days. FlightRadar24 which is a project started in Sweden and collected information about flight paths in real time around the world using VHF radio received was used extensively in the mainstream media including on the Channel 4 evening news in the UK. ITO produced an animation using that data which was mentioned on the Economist, Guardian and Huffington Post websites. It was also broadcast on Discovery Channel in Canada. Within the first three days it had been viewed online over 300,000 times.
This still from the animation shows very low activity on 18 April 2010.
And then more by 19 April 2010.
And apparently a pretty comprehensive service by 20 April 2010 (note that there is no data for France and some other areas of Europe).
A lot of things didn’t happen. Some people tried to organise coaches using social media and at least one person succeeded, however a lot of people spend considerable sums of money hiring cars, taxis and other low-occupancy vehicles rather than sharing costs. The UK government sending naval ships and over 100 coaches to Spain to bring people back on the 20/21 April.
