Watching the online community react to yesterdays events at the World Trade Center and beyond has strengthen my belief in the power of this medium. (The New York Times has an article about this as well.)

• As the events were unfolding the various mailing list I belong to grew quiet. The few postings came from people offering to be conduits to people in New York desperate to get messages out to friends and family. Some created a discussion group for support, others created a check-in Web site for people to learn if their New Yorker friends and family were OK and safe.
• Amazon.com's Honor System is being used as a donation point for Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. The number of donations are climbing at an unbelievable rate. At 10:43 ET, 13,943 people had already donated US$350,783.11. A minute later, US$1,471.89 more had been given by another 45 people. PayPal has a similar page.
• The populizer of the most loathed Web ad-style yet, the pop-under, X10.com has converted its to direct people to donate to the Red Cross (see a screen capture).
• Given the bandwidth scarcity, many online news sites initially stop serving ads on the main page, and eventually scaled back the pages entirely. Many other media outlets stopped airing or printing ads as well. I'd hope this was done less out of first, necessity and more out of respect for the severity of the attacks. (I'll be posting some images later).
• Poynter.org has put together some excellent resources about how journalism is treating this incident. Online-news pundit Steve Outing himself has a good column on how online media can follow-up on the story.