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E-Media Tidbits

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Will Sullivan
A group weblog about the intersection of news & technology


Social Media's Tracking Swine Flu
Posted by Will Sullivan at 12:28 PM on Apr. 28, 2009
Whenever a big news story happens, I love watching Wikipedia edits to see how the information grows and gets changed throughout the process. The swine flu entry is no different. This kind of iterative information collecting is a potential model for journalism in the future.

Adam Ostrow of Mashable.com notes that swine flu is now getting tweeted 10,000 times per hour:

"As you can see in the chart below, Tweets about 'Swine Flu' are now at 10,000 per hour, up from an average of a few thousand earlier in the day. Of course, this is the snowball effect that Twitter can have on a given subject, whether it be Christian Bale, Susan Boyle, Ashton Kutcher or other viral phenomenons that we've seen pop up since the microblogging site crossed the chasm, so to speak."

Ben Parr, also of Mashable.com, collected a good list of resources for tracking the disease, from maps to travel notices, but Don Reisinger of Webware compiled an awesome list of resources.

Have you seen any interesting social media coverage of swine flu?

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