As the wildfires grew to epic proportions in Southern California's mountains, so did an online network of displaced residents hungry for details about their homes and neighbors.
Communities scattered by the flames regrouped via the Internet, staying in touch and informed through Web logs, e-mail and streaming audio of police and fire radio transmissions.
Some residents even turned themselves into reporters and lit out for the fire lines, where they pressed authorities for details that they posted online along with photos of the firescape.
For communities in the scorched San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, the Web site RimOfTheWorld.net became a lifeline.
"It gave the village a set of drums to get the message out," said Gary Stebbings, a construction manager who monitored the Web site regularly after evacuating his home in the alpine town of Lake Arrowhead.
The phenomenon was "the ultimate democratization of the media," said Howard Rheingold, a futurist and author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.""The AP has only so many reporters and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access."
The Southern California fires killed 22 people, destroyed some 3,600 homes and blackened more than 743,000 acres of brush and timber over the past two weeks before cooler, wetter weather enabled firefighters to knock down the flames.
Scott Straley launched RimOfTheWorld.net seven weeks ago as a small community hub for information, hardly imagining it would draw a half-million page views in a single day.
The site's inbox was brimming with e-mails asking, "Did you hear from so-and-so? Do you know where so-and-so is?," said Straley, who worked 12-hour days on the site after evacuating his home in nearby Cedarpines Park. (His home escaped harm.)
Straley also received and posted digital photos of both damaged and unscathed homes.
An electronic bulletin board at RimOfTheWorld.net enabled people to learn what had happened to their homes.
"Has anyone heard if Kuffel Canyon burned?" one person asked Monday.
"Drove up Kuffel Canyon yesterday to (Highway) 18 and it was all fine," came the reply.
Stebbings, who waited out the blazes with his wife and five children in a Carlsbad hotel, hooked up to the Internet with a laptop. He also kept up with round-the-clock emergency scanner traffic carried by an AM-quality channel on Live365.com, an Internet radio site.
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