Legal Research

Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost

I’d wanted to post something about swine flu and the Web, but these guys beat me to the punch. That’s the price I (gladly) pay for not blogging on the weekends.

Anyway, I want to examine how people are using the only Internet sites anybody really cares about anymore — Google, Facebook, and Twitter — to find out more about swine flu.

• Google - A search for swine flu returns the sf page at the Centers for Disease Control as the first organic result. I have retrieved a quality hit in .21 seconds. I can now go about my business. (Google may no longer be the glamorous darling of the Internet, but there’s no school like the old school. And if I use Google Trends, I can see how interest in sf has skyrocketed in the last few days, and learn which regions and cities are most interested in it.)

• Facebook - They’re powered by Microsoft Live Search. My sf search retrieves the Wikipedia sf page first, followed by the CDC’s page. No complaints. But no love either. I’ll stick with Google.

• Twitter - I searched for sf prior to writing this post. There have been an additional 3,491 — no it’s 3,519, wait it’s now 3,558, oh I give up — Tweets since I started typing. This is typical of what I’m seeing: “I think I have the swine flu. I don’t feel good and I’m fat and look like a pig.” (Sigh. The power of social media, unleashed.)

I’ll leave you with the following quote from one of those guys who blogs on Saturday:

“I think it’s only a matter of time before that the next generation of cyber-terrorists — those who are smart about social media, are familiar with modern information flows, and are knowledgeable about human networks — take advantage of the escalating fears over the next epidemic and pollute the networked public sphere with scares that would essentially paralyze the global economy. Often, such tactics would bring much more destruction than the much-feared cyberwar and attacks on physical — rather than human — networks.”

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on April 27, 2009 (boomark / email).