Horrible news of a massive earthquake in Sichuan province today. For anyone who's searching for the very latest news coming out of the Chengdu area, Twitter is a good source of real-time updates.

Searching twitterlocal.net for people tweeting out of Chengdu gives the following stream of tweets (RSS). There are a few people you may want to follow: In English, inwalkedbud, lyrrael, trusip, and chengdoo.

In Chinese, ycc, est, WizarKID, and foxwoods.

Elliot Ng over at CN Reviews recommends using Summarize to search for the terms 地震 or earthquake. Similarly, you can use twifan.com to search Chinese Twitter-like sites (fanfou.com, jiwai.de) for keywords like 成都/Chengdu or 地震/earthquake.

Hope that helps anyone looking for information.

Let's all hope that those in Chengdu and surrounding areas can push though this OK. From the news that's coming in so far, things do not look good. Thoughts are with everyone down there tonight.

Update: One of my Chinese friends just sent me a message: "People in Sichuan saw thousands of frogs crawling in the street, which is believed may mean something terrible." He's right. Elliot Ng points to the following picture on ifgogo:

 

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