Tracking Internet Chatter Helps Spot Swine Flu Outbreak

This article describes how usefull tracking the flow of social media traffic can be for spotting disease outbreaks.

Tech tools for tracking disease outbreaks have been useful for following the spread of swine flu and one startup even claims to have recognized the severity of the outbreak in Mexico before government public health officials.

Veratect, a Seattle-based biosurveillance startup, claims they alerted the Centers for Disease Control to the situation in Mexico — where health officials suspect swine flu has killed up to 149 people — on April 16, before even the Mexican health authorities declared a problem.

How’d they get ahead of the outbreak? By monitoring and analyzing the flow of social media traffic along with more official reports, the company’s CEO said.

“We started picking up the early indicators of social disruption, whether it shows up on blogs or Twitter,” said Bob Hart, the CEO of Veratect. “We can pick up the first indicators of behavioral changes.”

The swine flu outbreak provides an excellent test case for the variety of tech tools that have developed to track disease outbreaks. In the best case scenario, by tracking what average people, professionals and reporters write about disease, you could spot a potentially serious outbreak before it occurs. The Google.org-backed data scraping tool, Healthmap, and a network of health professionals, ProMED, picked up signs the outbreak could be severe, but both organizations said it was difficult to determine how severe the outbreak could be.

“We had many events that we were tracking, and it wasn’t until mid- to late-April that we saw [swine flu] becoming a big deal,” said John Brownstein, founder of HealthMap. “It’s really hard to predict which situation is going to be the one that takes off.”

Source: Wired Sciences

Favourite Website Awards: equivalent to Oscars

The Favourite Website Awards is the most interesting place to see the latest and best cutting edge website designs on the World Wide Web.

It was named number 1 web award in the world and considered by the Chicago Tribunes to become to Internet excellence what Oscar is to film excellence.

FWA selects and showcases future thinking, progressively designed sites who use cutting edge technology together with inspirational ideas, that lead the way to future generations.

Thefwa.com is a place you will enjoy without limits….

Vegetarian: For people. For Animal. For Planet

” Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet ” said Albert Einstein.

I picked up three excellent videos to have different views:

1. Choking video
2. Narrative video
3. Animated video

Pick the one you prefer, and think about going vegetarian. It’s one of the best choices I never made.

1:

2:

3:

Social Media Landscape

This new landscape is spitted into four main usages (expressing, sharing, networking, playing) and is structured around social platforms which ambition is to cover each user’s needs.

The large size version is here : Social Media Landscape (redux).

Four Main Usages

The various tools and services displayed on this landscape are listed bellow.

1. Expressing tools allow users to express themselves, discuss and aggregate their social life:

• Publicatin tools like blogs (Blogger, Typepad, WordPress), wikis (Wikipedia, Wetpaint, Wikia), microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, Identica), citizen news (Digg, Newsvine, AgoraVox) and livecast (JustinTV, Ustream, BlogTV) ;
• Discussion tools like forums (phpBB, Phorum) and video forum (Seesmic), instant messengers (Y! Messenger, Live Messenger, Meebo, eBuddy), comments services (IntenseDebate, Cocomment, Disqus, BackType) and 3D chats (IMVU, Habbo, WeeWorld, vSide) ;
• Aggregation tools (FriendFeed, SocialThing, LifeSteam, Profilactic, Plurk…).

2. Sharing tools allow users to publish and share content:

• Content sharing for videos (YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo), pictures (FlickR, SmugMug, Picasa, Fotolog), music and playlists (Last.fm, iLike, Deezer), links (Delicious, Magnolia, Reddit) and documents (Slideshare, Scrib, Slideo) ;
• Product sharing with recommendations platforms (Crowdstorm, ThisNext, StyleHive), collaborative feedback platforms (FeedBack 2.0, UserVoice, GetSatisfaction) or swaping platforms (LibraryThing, Shelfari, SwapTree) ;
• Place sharing with tools based on local adresses (BrighKite, Loopt, Whrrl, Moximity), on events (Upcoming, Zvents, EventFul, Socializr) and on trips (TripWolf, TripSay, Driftr, Dopplr).

3. Networking tools allow users to search, connect and interact with each other’s:

• Search networks allowing users to find ex-classmates (Classmates, MyYearBook, Alumni) or persons (MyLife) ;
• Niche networks (Boompa, Dogster, PatientsLikeMe, Footbo) ;
• BtoB networks (LinkedIn, Plaxo, Xing, Viadeo) ;
• Mobile networks (Groovr, MocoSpace, ItsMy, Zannel) ;
• Tools to build an online network (Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, CollectiveX).

4. Playing services that now integrate strong social features:

• Casual games portals (Pogo, Cafe, Doof, Kongregate, PlayFirst, PopCap, BigFish, Prizee) ;
• Social games portals (Zynga, SGN, ThreeRings, PlayFish, CasualCafe, ChallengeGames) ;
• MMORPGs (World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online, EVE Online, Lineage, Dofus, Runescape) ;
• MMOs (Drift City, Kart Rider, Maple Story, Audition, Combat Arms, Quake Live) ;
• Casual MMOs (Puzzle Pirates, Club Penguin, Neopets, Gaia Online, SmallWorlds, OurWorld).

From Social Networks to social Platform

At the center of this landscape we will find former social networks, which have evolved to progressively integrate more and more functionalities and morphed themselves into social platforms. The notion of ‘platform‘ is particularly relevant since those network have the ability to host applications (mostly the one you find on the four main usages).

We can split social platforms into two groups: The First Generation which have been existing since more then 5 years and gather between 50 and 200 millions of users (Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, Orkut, Skyrock, Hi5, Windows Live…) and The New Wave of social players which have a similar offering and a fast growing audience (between 20 and 50 millions users – Netlog, Imeem, Piczo, Lexode, Hyves, Buzznet, Xanga, Zorpia…).

Google and Yahoo! are still absent from the social scene (wait, maybe not…)

You will also notice in this landscape the discretion of Google and Yahoo! which are ‘only’ represented by services that did not managed to break through the social scene (while being strong references, Blogger, YouTube, FlickR cannot be considered has dominant social platforms). Let’s be honest: MySpace and Facebook decently steal the spotlight from Google and Yahoo!.

Wait… maybe not if you consider Google as a being in a much more favorable situation with lower-level services like Gmail (one needs an email to register Facebook, right?) or Google Maps (can you count the number of social services relying on Google mapping tool?). Add to this there current cash situation and it leaves them plenty of time to sharpen their social strategy (Maybe by buying Twitter or FriendFeed, or booth!).

The same is true for Yahoo! which can rely on a massive user base (still outnumbering Facebook’s one) and essential social bricks like Delicious, Yahoo! Pipes, MyBlogLog and the promising Fire Eagle.

Did I mention Microsoft? Yes, Microsoft, those guys behind Hotmail, MSN and Windows Live. Ignoring them would be a big mistake and Mark Z. was more than happy to welcome them in FB’s capital.

From this pint of view, the author expects a very thought battle around authentication services (Facebook Connect, Google Accounts…) allowing social platforms to exist outside of their boundaries and to export their members’ social graph. Big players like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have to emphasis their legitimacy as historical web players to keep control over their users.

Source: Fredcavazza

PostSecret: Anonymous secret on postcard

PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Select secrets are then posted once a week on the PostSecret website, or used for PostSecret’s books or museum exhibits.

The simple concept of the project was that completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they had never previously revealed. No restrictions are made on the content of the secret; only that it must be completely truthful, must never have been spoken before and must be send on a 10×15 cm postcard. Entries range from admissions of sexual misconduct and criminal activity to confessions of secret desires, embarrassing habits, hopes and dreams.

New posts are available on the PostSecret blog, and the community is accessible from the website PostSecretCommunity.

I haven’t send my secret yet, did you?

NoHunger: The film to make end malnutrition

No hunger is a film initiated by Action Against Hunger as a first phase of its ”Campaign to End Malnutrition”, a global effort to publicize the story of hunger.
Global hunger affects more than 963 millions people and kills more than 5 milliosn childs a year, even if it’s preventable, predictable, and cost-effective to treat.
Now, they have the tools to end acute malnutrition: a range of micronutrient-dense Ready-To-Use-Foods, available but no sufficiently available.

They want to convaince Al gore to make a film with the same impact of ”An Inconvient Truth” but for alarming people on the greatest tragedy of the 21st Century, and mobilize them against the tragedy of global malnutrition.
Sign the petition to ask Al Gore to produce this movie.
Let’s join to eradicate this tragedy!

Microsoft 2019 futur vision

The following video presents the world in 2019 according to microsoft experts.

The focus is mainly on the graphical user interface improvment. The innovations look very exciting:

Gaia: The future of politics

This vision of futur politics is very interesting in its first analysis.  Its becomes strong hypothesis when it comes to the division of the world in two main areas.

Still, the power of Internet is imprevisible and without limits. This scenario could occured. And its very well illustrated.

The Million Dollar Homepage

One million dollar in 4 months: can you take this challenge? A 21-year-old student did. Alex wanted to raise money for his university education. His great idea: to try and make $1m (US) by selling 1,000,000 pixels of a website homepage for $1 each. In fact, the home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.

Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon.

The auction closed on 11 January 2006  with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income.

The Human Clock

This artistic project is a website showing time. Waw, nothing surprising at all you will say! Indeed, the clock is displayed by humans. Humanclock website  shows a photograph of the current time, with the photo changing every minute of the day. Thus you end up with a rotating picture clock.

How the time is actually displayed is a whole different matter. A lot of photos have the time written on a crummy cardboard sign, while other photos might have the current time in a more edible format, such as olives. There are photos below sea level and ones over two miles above sea level. There are even clock pictures with people who played at Woodstock.

You can submit your own photo creation and be under the spot for at least one minute!