New Katrina Website Adds Blogs, Signs with Urban Entrepreneur Partnership (UEPGC)

New Orleans, LA, February 29, 2008 --(PR.com)-- A New Orleans area survivor who helped create the Red Cross missing persons database immediately after Katrina recently purchased a domain, www.katrinaconnection.com, which served as an info and missing persons portal after the hurricanes, giving survivors of hurricanes Katrina or Rita and concerned citizens a novel new way to network, interact, get current affairs, and now blog.

The startup website already had a forum and offers news feeds, news features, helpful resource links, pictures with stories from survivors today, and Katrina-related videos. Now it includes a blogging section called the "TalkBox" where anyone can "Blog 'til their heart's content", said the site owner, Wayne Filmore. "The site already offers welcome media alternatives for us hurricane survivors, and I've found most other people who've been through it don't mind talking about it, either...in fact, we need to".

The most site hits he ever recorded in a day was only 224 since its launch in December 2007 but that small number is not discouraging, but promising to the former Katrina evacuee. Filmore said "When I personally reunited that child and mother - or husband and wife - in different cities after Katrina, it was always such an emotional, intense feeling for me that it brought tears to my eyes, although we had well over 3000 evacuees in the shelter I worked out of. If this website only reaches 10% of the million people who evacuated, and brings together or helps only 10% of that many people, I'll feel like it's accomplished something."

Katrina Connection recently signed with the Urban Entrepreneurial Partnership Gulf Coast (UEPGC), which is part of a White House-sponsored minority small-business initiative for business development, and is seeking feedback and partnerships with several universities on surveys and pertinent documentation of hurricane survivors.

"What I need now is for hurricane survivors and just anyone who cares to explore the whole site, start blogging, and interact with me", said the new web publisher. "I want other Katrina or Rita survivors to understand they don't have to take the online abuse or hear only the negative views, that they have another way to reach out for people they haven't seen or heard from in over two years; that they can speak their mind on the internet - to know there is an alternative out here, with a connection to available resources that may even be able to help them, or they may not even be aware of."

For more information, visit www.katrinaconnection.com, or e-mail info@katrinaconnection.com.

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