Interdictor is the name of a

LiveJournal LiveJournal (russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, a ...

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

that documented the

effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans As the center of Hurricane Katrina passed southeast of New Orleans on August 29, 2005, winds downtown were in the Category 1 range with frequent intense gusts. The storm surge caused approximately 23 breaches in the drainage canal and navi ...

during and following the destruction. It is operated by Michael Barnett. At the time he was an employee of Directnic.com, an internet services company on the 10th and 11th floors of an office building in downtown New Orleans at 650 Poydras Avenue, which he referred to as "Outpost Crystal" (after Barnett's fiancée, Crystal Coleman). Daniel Gifford, another employee of directNIC.com, also contributed many articles to the blog. In the early aftermath of the hurricane and flooding, it was one of the few reliable communications links between downtown New Orleans and the rest of the world.

Operation during Hurricane Katrina

Operating on a diesel generator when power was lost, Barnett and fellow bloggers provided a continuous stream of reports of what was actually happening and, through webcams, live video feeds, and thousands of high resolution pictures, gave the rest of the world a chance to see the looting and destruction firsthand before the rest of the media arrived on the scene. Using

Internet Relay Chat Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

and

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

they kept in constant contact with the outside world.

Use as source by other media

The Interdictor blog quickly became a widely recognized and cited source from inside New Orleans. Sources such as

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...

even read directly from the blog on the air, putting its contents on-screen. Even after the media arrived, the Interdictor blog was still commonly cited as a reference to the events ongoing in New Orleans. The blog's debut and rise to prominence during the hurricane and its aftermath was listed in an

MSN MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95. The Microsoft Net ...

/''

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tech ...

'' article as number 14 on a list of "The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History".

Activity since the hurricane

Currently the blog is used by Barnett to discuss issues related to New Orleans specifically and politics generally. It has a distinctly libertarian slant as Barnett is a self-described

Austrian School The Austrian School is a heterodox school of economic thought that advocates strict adherence to methodological individualism, the concept that social phenomena result exclusively from the motivations and actions of individuals. Austrian schoo ...

economist, libertarian and

anarcho-capitalist Anarcho-capitalism (or, colloquially, ancap) is an anti-statist, libertarian, and anti-political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enfo ...

References

{{reflist

External links

Interdictor blog
Works about Hurricane Katrina American political blogs

Operation during Hurricane Katrina

Use as source by other media

Activity since the hurricane

See also

References

External links