Kodak, devoted to the digital future, has a new Twitter feed. Take a look at @kodakidigprint.

A Twitter friend, @marismith, has just returned from a long vacation RVing across Alaska and the Canadian west. She discovered 1200 e-mails waiting for her.

I got thinking about that number. In the old days, a couple of years ago, we would have been talking about phone messages. 1200 messages? Nope, no way. People would call and realize that you were not home and either leave a message or wait until you got back.

She was gone four to six weeks. Being a bright and educated user of the Internet, I’m sure she had her e-mail set to reply an “out of office” message.

Without knowing a thing about her situation, my guess was that she had a lot of spam. With the best filter, I still get 6-8 spam e-mails a day. I also have Google alerts, and daily e-mails from job hunting sites.

I’m on a couple of military mailing lists, so I get a bunch of press releases from Iraq. Bloggers’ Roundtable generates a few more e-mails each week.

I get the odd e-mail from family and friends, but if I were on vacation they’d know not to e-mail me. I get social media notifies for friends and followers.

Someone signed me up for the Pajamas Media morning summary, feh. I’m on the HARO list for 3 e-mails each weekday.

Sadly, examining the preceding, most of my e-mail comes from lists and not people. [frown]

OK, so to the 1200. Find the obvious spams and delete. Find the e-mails from the various lists and delete those that are too old to be useful.

Mari gets 30-40 e-mails a day. I get about half that. She’s got 120-240 e-mails that she will want to spend time on, my guess.

But none of this would have happened if she only had an answering machine.

A collection of remarks on Twitter from right after her speech.

• Little known fact: Sarah Palin is weak sauce indeed. All she did was regurgitate std GOP blather. Not a single new idea in the whole speech.
• i dont like sarah palin. she has no more experience than obama, and she would suck as prez, which she will be cause mccain’s gonna die soon.
• Initial reactions to Sarah Palin’s speech: this woman’s bitterness and her scowl indicates, I think, that she has never had an orgasm
• Bottom line: I do not want to live in Sarah Palin’s America.
• That’s… if you write fan fiction, please write me some of that. I’d love to read Sarah Palin/Cindy McCain femslash.
• 1st impression of Sarah Palin is that’s she’s a prime bitch. Good thing I had no plans to vote Republican anyway.
• is disgusted by what Sarah palin has to say and her horrid way she sounds.
• Currently trying to resist the urge to vomit after listening to sarah palin’s speech.
• Rude sarcasm, that sums up Sarah Palin’s speech in two words and does it justice.
• Sarah Palin’s “speech”? Just a string of cheap shots, nothing more. What an amateur!

Hurricane Gustav was far less a threat than many expected, this past week. It presented the new media, Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0, with the opportunity to strut their stuff. Community building, networking, two-way communication, citizen journalism and more were on display.

Rick Sanchez led the way over at CNN. On Twitter, Rick is @ricksanchezcnn. Using Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and other New Media tools, Rick covered the hurricane with up to the second reports from people in New Orleans and elsewhere in the affected region. He was also able to respond to questions and concerns on the spot. I was one of many who had their “tweet” read on the air during that time.

Twitter is an unusual product that has exploded into the Internet in 2008, though it has been in existence since March, 2006. It is similar to text messaging on cell phones, only the message is limited to 140 characters. A variety of third parties have joined with the Twitter people to create a variety of interfaces, programs that allow you to have Twitter running and updating on your screen just as you would AIM or another Internet messaging program. There are also interfaces for a number of cellphones enabling you to twitter from your phone.

People were doing just that in New Orleans and other places where Hurricane Gustav hit.

Companies and groups were also using Twitter, and very effectively. Home Depot, @TheHomeDepot , was able to let everyone know which stores were open, or, newly reopened, and which stores have been resupplied. The Red Cross, @RedCross , sent out updates on their relief efforts, safety tips and encouragement. Sprint Nextel Corp.’s “Public policy PR guy” John Taylor, @jbtaylor , kept the world current with Sprint’s activities concerning the storm, and general information on how telecoms handle events like Gustav.

Twitter traffic about Hurricane Gustav got so heavy that a “hashtag” or unique identifier was created so that the Gustav traffic could be found via Twitter Search. #gustav became the identifier for all Hurricane Gustav tweets and the entire list went up here.

Two other New Media sites were created for Gustav. The social network site Ning was used by Andy Carvin, @acarvin , to create a place to aggregate all the Gustav information flying around the Internet. He, and the people who worked with him, also set up the Hurricane Information Center Wiki. The Ning site was for tweets, e-mails and other up to the minute information. The wiki was a collaborative effort to put all the static information in one place.

Both site were very active and today contain a tremendous amount of information about Hurricane Gustav, the people it affected, the places it affected and how others world-wide helped and are still helping.

Rick Sanchez of CNN was not alone in working with the New Media while in Old Media. A number of reporters also were on Twitter and posting pictures to sites like Flickr where they could be seen by all. The Chicago Tribune had @GustavReporter also known as James Janega and several associates in New Orleans and they produced for both Old and New Media.

The hurricane was also blogged by many people, including some world-class experts. Brendan Loy made his place in Internet history with his outstanding blogging during Hurricane Katrina and continued it with Gustav. Dr. Jeff Masters continued his hurricane blogging with Gustav. Many others, weather experts and weather amateurs, contributed to the information and dialog throughout the period.

Hurricane Gustav allowed New Media to strut its stuff. It did not replace Old Media, but it gave Old Media an up-to-the-minute information stream and feedback that it had never worked with before. It was communication in its truest sense, media, companies and organizations and information consumers / providers all working together in real time to assist, inform and reveal the disaster that was Gustav.