Last week, when multiple fires converged on San Diego, it was initially hard to find reliable and consistent status updates. News websites were slow to update – due to either server outages, electricity shortages or staffing issues at the local media organizations.

Tired of surfing around to the same sites repeatedly throughout the day, I tested Google’s mashup beta to gather data from Google’s news feed, San Diego’s KPBS map data and Twitter feed, news updates from a San Diego blogger and a list of useful links into a single webpage.

The page is a simple one and has display issues in Safari 2, but was a useful exercise in creating meaningful information from disparate data feeds and the project got a positive response from the mashup community.