Cellphone communication has broken down in southern Louisiana, but Kaye Trammell, an assistant professor at LSU in Baton Rouge, reports that text messaging seems to be working:

Many people are saying in comment section that if you can't get through to an impacted love one via cell phone - try text messaging!

That makes sense to me as my cell has not received incoming calls since Saturday night but I continue to get e-mail & blog from my BlackBerry.

Naturally, a bit of text requires far less bandwidth than voice, just as a little text file on your hard drive is far smaller than a music file.

(Kaye, when she was finishing up her doctorate at the U. of Florida, handled all the arrangements for a panel on converged journalism I was part of in early 2004.)

Brendan Loy and his friend Mike Wiser at The Irish Trojan (with help from guest-blogging family members), and Josh Britton are still blogging every bit of incoming news.

John Strain, of Covington, La., the psychiatric social worker who weathered the storm in the hospital where he works, has gotten an audio post up at John's Online Journal. While delivering patients to Baton Rouge, since their hospital was about to run out of food, he found a phone, recorded a message at AudioBlogger, and got a text link up on his blog.

"It's gonna take years, it's gonna have to be rebuilt, it's gonna be a different town."

He's keeping a journal to post when he can get back on the Net.

All these bloggers take their responsibility to longtime and new readers just as seriously as any newsroom does when disaster hits their areas, and they're going out of their way to find ways to post when they might shrug and say, "Sorry, no Net connection."

WWL-TV has a text log going with the latest information, posting every few minutes.

The TV station's streaming video is live and real. The reporters left their French Quarter studios when water began to rise and they moved to their transmitter facility in Gretna.

No fancy graphics, dicey chance of getting the right video shown, just a coupla guys in golf shirts and caps passing on what they've seen and what's coming in to them.

As the WWL log reports that 60,000 are now in the Superdome with more headed there, include those rescued from rooftops, the site's homepage leads with Blanco: City must evacuate. This was momentarily puzzling -- where is Blanco? -- until I learned that Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has ordered the evacuation of the Superdome and prisons in the city.
Earlier, in a press conference televised live, she had said that rising waters from the breaks in the levee threatened the generators at the Superdome, which provided only a few lights and no air-conditioning after the power went out. Now the task is to move 60,000 frightened, hot, hungry people... somewhere.

(Projo.com, like WWL, is a Belo site, and we're sluggish, with a text-only homepage to reduce server load, so we can give more bandwidth to New Orleans. The Net is very busy. If pages aren't loading, this is why. Keep trying. It's just heavy traffic.

Instant karma: Overnight I complained about Dylan stories about the Scorsese documentary and soundtrack we can't share. Today, Jorn Barger points to AOL's "Full CD listening party" of the No Direction Home soundtrack.

At first I was getting only 8 notes in a row, but it kicked in better later. I only had time for one song (She Belongs to Me, appropriately) before it dropped out again and I switched back to hurricane video, but that was sweet.