Tracking influenza and other illnesses based on social media
isn't new. In a 2011 paper, researchers reported being able to
accurately track disease levels for the swine flu outbreak two
years earlier by searching for keywords such as flu, vaccine,
illness, Tamiflu and pneumonia. The University of Rochester has
turned research about predicting the spread of diseases with
social media into a web application called Germ Tracker. The
colorful interactive map pulls up geo-tagged Tweets that contain
keywords related to illness. If you find a tweet that's clearly
miss-labeled (like someone bragging that their new car is
"sick"), click a button to let the app know they're not actually
sick. It also allows self reporting with a slider you can set to
Awful, Sick, Yuck, Meh or Good and options to share specific
symptoms. Sick Weather is a similar project that can pull from
Facebook and Twitter to map and show animations of contagious
illnesses such as chicken pox, colds and whooping cough, as well
as other issues like