Spent an interesting hour listening to the folks at Missing People give a talk at work today, which I’ll be putting together into a podcast for internal use. They are starting to use social networks and new media to get messages out to people who have gone missing from their families, or from missing people who want to let their families know they’re OK.  Checkout the fact that they have pages at Myspace, Bebo or Facebook and you’ll see the sort of thing I mean.

They can also received emails from missing people, and scrambling of the email protects the anonymity until the person until they actually want to be found.

Particulary poignant was Nicki Durbin, mother of Luke Durbin, who is a missing person. Clearly a difficult issue to get up and talk about, Nikki gave a moving account of how she now believes her son is dead, but that she’ll never give up on him and declare him legally dead.