Milly Dowler

The Police may have a breakthrough in the murder of 13 year old Milly Dowler who was abducted nearly three years ago. They are trying to identify the red N registration Daewoo Nexia in the photo below.


The Surrey Police Miller Dowler page looks very like a Weblog in that it is a collection of notices in reverse chronological order. It is very disappointing to see that at the time of writing however it has not been updated with the latest appeal, but please go to that page for contact details if you know anything about the car.

I have thought for a long time that a Weblog could be a very useful tool for distributing information to the public and the media for ongoing investigations.

Associating an RSS feed with the Milly Dowler page would enable journalists and interested members of the public to follow the case. This could be particularly important in cases like this tragedy where progress is sporadic as subscription would allow automatic notification to any interested person or system. The likelihood that local Webloggers would link back to the page, or add it to their blogrolls would also increase the visibility of the information.

In a similar vein and more generally, Neighbourhood Watch web sites - for example - based on Web Log Technology could utilise RSS easily and cheaply to mirror information from the Police etc. to keep themselves up to date.