The effectiveness of mass alerts in the event of violent situations on a campus can be debated all day long. But, we all know how effective things like Twitter, Instant Messaging and SMS messages can be in our daily lives.The big question marks are: "If you have an emergency alert system, how will sending hundreds of thousands of messages over provider networks at once effect all the systems?" and "Who sends out the messages and under what criteria? plus - what specific information is sent out and how helpful is it?"
All that being said, if your organization has an emergency information RSS feed (like Duke does ) you can at least know when something's posted to it. Although I suggest subscribing to that feed in your favorite RSS processing method - you can also use a service like Yahoo Alerts to filter new posts right to your phone.
This is a pretty bare bones way to do it. I'm playing around with Yahoo Pipes, Twitter and some other webapps to find more robust methods.
