Do you know who this boy is?
You may be one of the millions who received an email in their inbox containing a picture of a little boy. A young victim of December's terrible tsunami, he was brought to a hospital in Phuket, Thailand which sent out this brief message:
Looking for his family.
The boy about 2 years, was found in Khoa Lak without his parents.
Nobody knows what country he comes from.
A friend sent me this email and I was immediately struck by the picture of the little boy - helpless, confused, in shock. After all, here was a little toddler in a foreign land and separated from his parents after undergoing the worst experience of his little life.
My heart went out to him.
I promptly emailed everybody I knew with his picture, just in case somebody out there knew who he was. Within an hour somebody emailed me back with the news that the boy had been reunited with his dad.
It seems that one of the millions who saw the boy's picture on the Net was his uncle in Sweden who identified the lad, and also was able to get the hospital to contact another hospital in Phuket where his dad was. Unfortunately, last I heard, Mum was still missing.
What a wonderful reunion for the little boy Hannes with his dad. Undoubtedly, it was the Net at its best, with millions of strangers around the world galvanised into action at the press of a button.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/29/tsunami.sweden.boy.ap/index.html.
Unfortunately, the Net seems to have no mechanism to stop itself as I still get emails from friends and contacts asking if I know who this boy is. There are lots of
emails that continue to fly around the Net for years asking for signatures to stop appeal against this or campaign against that. In a number of instances, I have found that on-line hunting reveals that a deadline is past, or the wrong has been righted, or the victim being campaigned for is now dead.
We need a new mechanism that ties such emails in to a central repository that allows a ready reference to be made available on the current situation relating to that email. That way things that still need to be acted on can get the attention they deserve while things that are past acting on can be appreciated for the work that happened to bring them to completion.
Without such a central repository, we will get jaded (if that has not already happened) with still more "urgent" requests, plus we will have the Net's precious bandwidth swallowed up circulating pointless emails - we have enough of that already, thank you very much, spammers.
Who should create this central repository? Maybe it does not have to be a central one, as long as emails carry metadata that enable a lookup of a relevant web page. Given that the vast majority of the world's emailers use Microsoft tools such as Outlook or Outlook Express, what about Microsoft showing the way?
Anyway, let's enjoy the Net bringing Hannes together with his dad - but let's not forget that his story brings home the need for a rethink on how we use the Net.
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