The cameras watch her every move. Thousands of strangers want to be her friend, and thousands more follow her latest exploits hour by hour on their laptops and cell phones.
She’s Mt. Redoubt, Internet star.
With her first eruption in 20 years, Redoubt volcano has reawakened just in time to ignite a new kind of media blitz — an explosion of immediate, online information that was hard to imagine just a year or two ago.
Within weeks, pages about Redoubt on Twitter and Facebook became some of the most popular in Alaska. Even those who dismiss such social networking sites as silly can follow near hourly updates and scour photos of the eruption on the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s own Web site, which saw traffic boom a hundredfold immediately after Redoubt roared to life in March.
And yes, Redoubt is a girl.
It says so on her irreverent, unauthorized Facebook page, where more than 1,500 people have befriended the volcano. They write messages encouraging her — “I need a little more ash in my garden” — and cursing her: “I hate you … just stop.”
Others swap photos they’ve taken of the eruption and plead with Redoubt to cool it as each new explosion threatens air travel across the state.
The Alaska Volcano Observatory has nothing to do with the slightly goofy Facebook page, which is written anonymously from the volcano’s point of view and lists Redoubt as a Scientologist who is “in an open relationship” and watches the Discovery Channel.
Instead, the AVO Web masters climbed on board the Twitter train. Using their personal computers or iPhones because the state forbids employees to log in to social networking sites, technicians launched the AVO Twitter page earlier this year as the volcano began flirting with another round of explosions.
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On Friday, the Twitter feed had more than 7,000 followers — including many who signed up just to read the latest volcano updates.
“They have the biggest following of anyone in Alaska that we can find,” said Anchorage technology consultant and Twitter guru John Proffitt.