Londoners strike back rioters with FB, Twitter

Brooms raised defiantly in the air, Londoners began cleaning up their city yesterday after a third night of riots, with a Twitter and Facebook campaign rallying people to the most damaged areas.
The online-driven clean-up campaign is partly a riposte to the way that social networking sites and BlackBerry messaging services have been used by rioters to organise the violence in the British capital.
In Clapham Junction, a relatively affluent area of south London, more than 200 people gathered at a police cordon waiting to be allowed access to a street full of burned-out terraced buildings and smashed glass.
"We all live in this community and we wanted to show the world that we respect it," said James Hossack, a 38-year-old consultant, who took the day off work to help.
Cheska Moon, 37, an actor from Clapham, said a friend had told her about the Clean Up London, (@Riotcleanup) campaign on the microblogging site Twitter.
The account had 70,223 followers on Twitter by mid-afternoon yesterday, as it instructed people to congregate to remove the glass and bricks strewn across the streets of the city.
"We really wanted to do something to help. It's just disgusting," Moon said.
Amid a party atmosphere in the area nicknamed "Nappy Valley" because of the preponderance of young middle class families, volunteers brought their own brooms and bin-bags to help with the clean-up.
Organisers handed out brand new brushes to those who had come unprepared.
But the mood turned when London Mayor Boris Johnson -- criticised for being away on holiday for the first two days of the riots -- later came to Clapham Junction to thank the volunteers, saying their work represents "the spirit of London".
He was met with chants of "Where's your broom" and questions about the response of the authorities to the violence.
Many clean-up volunteers rejected arguments that the rioting was a sign of social ills or the harsh austerity measures introduced by Prime Minister David Cameron's coalition government to reduce Britain's record deficit.
The Association of British Insurers estimated the damage caused by the riots across Britain as "tens of millions of pounds".