I received an email from Livestream yesterday encouraging me to “Cover Sandy live using our Android or iPhone app.” I guess I should be happy that they weren’t able to tell I don’t live anywhere near the Sandy strike zone.

At first I thought it was poor taste to use a natural disaster to announce a new smart phone app.

I thought about it for a while, asking myself if this was any different from an ad telling me where I could find news about the storm. I also considered how much I appreciate the accounts of real people and the positive aspect of encouraging of users to share their own stories.

Maybe it isn’t so bad after all, but it still doesn’t seem right to me to capitalize on an event that brought death and destruction in this way. I guess it’s just the new face of Internet news advertising.