ReadyAlert's emergency text service

Hurricanes are completely foreign to me, living in the United Kingdom. A combination of Hollywood and grainy news footage out from the US doesn’t, I’m sure, do justice to the actual experience of living in a hurricane zone.

So I read this article in the St Petersburg Times with interest. It’s discussing the addition of ReadyAlert‘s text messaging service to the communications arsenal of the Pinellas County Emergency Management service.

Too often I’m reading about fun but rather inane uses of text messaging or the mobile medium, so it’s good to see where it’s actually having — or bound to have — real value to people. 1,000 people have apparently already signed up for notifications.