Youtube Video from Earthquake in Tokyo Japan

An 8.9-magnitude earthquake followed by a 10-foot tsunami hit the coast of Japan at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time Friday. It was the most powerful recorded in the country’s history, and the seventh largest ever recorded worldwide.

Victims and concerned parties quickly turned to the web to share news and footage. With the country’s phone system down, tweets topped more than 1,200 per minute from Tokyo within the first hour of the quake. Both Ustream and Al Jazeera, among others, posted live video feeds online.

Citizens have also taken to Flickr and YouTube to share eyewitness accounts from inside their homes and public buildings, and from the streets with their neighbors. We’ve compiled five of the most illustrative here, most of which are from Tokyo, situated 230 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter. (According to early reports, the earthquake originated off the coast of Honshu, the most populous of Japan’s islands.)

Come across any additional, noteworthy footage? Please share it in the comments section below. You can also check out YouTube’s CitizenTube channel, which is continually updating a playlist with more content.

An apartment in Tokyo

Gym in Tokyo

Grocery Store

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Join the League of Extraordinary #H4ckers at SXSW!

Heading to Austin, TX for South by Southwest (SXSW) this week? Good — so are we. And we’re planning what I hope will be a an event for the ages!

The festivities start at 1pm on March 13 with the opening of The League of Extraordinary Hackers followed by a very special SuperHappyDevHouse at 7pm at the Speakeasy on 412 Congress Ave in Austin.

Business by day, hacking by night

From 1pm to 6pm, we’ll be hosting a series of 15-minute rapid-fire API briefings focused on Google’s latest developer offerings including: Android, Chrome, HTML5, Blogger, Google TV, Google Maps, App Engine, YouTube, Web Fonts, Cellbots, and Fusion Tables. Immediately following each talk, the speakers will be holding court during office hours in Speakeasy’s open air rooftop lounge.

At the same time, we’ll be demoing Google TV and the YouTube Leanback experience in the Leanback Lounge on the second floor. And if you’re just looking for a place to chill, meet other Google developers, or grab free WiFi and juice for your devices, we’ve got you covered in that department as well.

Yes, this is one of our drink cards.

At 7pm, we’ll welcome the SuperHappyDevHouse community for a night of hacking, lightning talks, a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® sumobot competition (!), steampunkery, and Google TV and Xbox 360® Kinect™ tomfoolery. And if a soundtrack co-curated on Rdio weren’t enough to make your booty move, then come get loosened up with League-inspired elixirs concocted by Google’s own mixologist, Daniel “Gin not Vodka” Nadasi!

This event promises to be one-of-a-kind and a rare respite from the pure partying events at SXSW. Of course it wouldn’t be possible with a great cast of sponsors including Google, Windows Live, The LEGO Group, NPR, Sencha, Red Bull Creation, Twilio, and Rdio.

Get on the list and invite your friends

Since we’re managing attendees separately, the most important links you need are the ones that get you in (and get you free drinks!):

  1. RSVP for The League of Extraordinary Hackers
  2. RSVP for SHDH@SXSW

You can also find these events elsewhere:

  1. The League of Extraordinary Hackers is on Facebook, Plancast, and Lanyrd
  2. SHDH@SXSW is on Facebook, Plancast, and Lanyrd

Explore events with Localstreamer.com

Localstreamer.com

Localstreamer is a geolocation system that allows you to explore events, data and people’s thoughts in every place on the earth. Integrated with the latest technology to search real time, it can be used to search into the stream information about places, allows you to share or simply read a stream of information about any city on earth. People can also watch videos about the place searched , socialize using comment system or chat. Each day becomes more important the search and collection of local information. All the biggest companies are about to start a fight for the conquest of space in this area. Localstreamer is only a starting point, an experimental service that tries to convey information and to focus local campaigns, events, news made by users for users. Localstreamer offers Free API Access! Developers just need to sign up to get an API key to start working with the system. There is extensive documentation for devs as well. All data is returned in JSON string by default.