Google has created an embeddable “people finder” tool that is pulling together Haiti quake submissions across multiple news sites, reports Poynter Online. “Within 24 hours (of the quake), it became clear that there were too many places where people were putting information, and each site is a silo,” explained Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, who is working with Google to reach out to news sites to ask if they would combine their data into Google’s central database. CNN, for example, has uploaded its people data to the tool. You can grab the widget to embed on your site here.

I found it interesting that Google is providing a central tool to bridge an important database between news sites. You could imagine how they could do more of this in the future.

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