Bunkered down with his computers as cyclone Yasi hit land, Cairns computer technician Carl Butcher became a Twitter sensation

Do you understand the relevance of #TCYasi?

This was the “hashtag” or search term adopted by Twitter users last week as they sought information about the biggest storm to hit Australia in almost a century.
 
Freshwater amateur weather enthusiast Carl Butcher was very prepared for Yasi’s Category 5 winds and the web interest they would generate, and as the cyclone approached Queensland on Wednesday last week, he suddenly found himself with more than 10,000 followers on twitter.com/cycloneupdate.

Launched in 2006, the “microblogging” service Twitter is a social network with a difference - updates are limited to 140 characters. Developed originally as an SMS based mobile phone service that has since become equally popular on the web, Twitter is powered by short, sharp, succinct updates known as tweets. Allowing anyone to instantly communicate with millions, the service’s built in brevity has seen it become an almost perfect information tool in an emergency: Twitter now has 190 million users, tweeting 65 million tweets a day.

At first, many dismissed Twitter as a trivial irrelevance. By choosing a word that seemed to describe a short burst of inconsequential information, Twitter’s founders appeared to have unintentionally limited the site’s scope and ambition.

But any perceived notion of flakiness evaporated during the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, when Indians began tweeting updates moments after the first shots were fired, provided vivid eyewitness accounts as the drama unfolded, then pleaded for blood donors when stocks ran low. Mumbai showed that anyone could be a citizen journalist, and demonstrated Twitter’s real-time ability to share information and spread the word.

When IT expert Butcher, 26, set up his cycloneupdates account a couple of years ago to tweet about one of his favourite subjects, he was an early Twitter adaptor in the Far North.

Before Yasi appeared on the weather bureau’s maps his followers had grown to 400. Last Wednesday morning they swelled to more than 2,500, and by the time the storm touched down 10,000 people around the world were tracking it via Carl’s tweets.

“I knew Yasi was coming a week ago,” Butcher told CNN during a live interview conducted via webcam. “So I have basic rations, candles, batteries, masking tape, a makeshift bunker to shelter in. I’m as prepared as I can be.”

He certainly was. As well as the survival essentials, Butcher had equipped himself with several computers and laptops, UPS power packs, back-up 3G internet and a generator. He kept rolling throughout. If Yasi had struck Cairns rather than 100km south, he would still have been tweeting.

Last week thousands of Twitter users around the world turned to twitter.com/cairnsnews, twitter.com/ABCFarNorth and twitter.com/theqldpremier to follow the looming catastrophe.

But most of all they turned to  Far North Queensland very first Twitter star, Carl Butcher. Good work mate!

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