This issue came up in the Internet tribe recently:

http://hub.teamhuman.org/tribes/topic/6/

It prompted me to create this News tribe to provide a place to dispel misinformation concerning breaking news items, such as the swine flu.

This brings up a broader question of interest: What impact does social media have on the spread of infectious disease? The experiment is in progress now...

The New York Times on 13 April 2009 had an article about different ways Twitter is being used:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/technology/internet/14twitter.html

They note how it is picking up steam in the corporate world for allowing companies to quickly keep in touch with their customer base. But some other surprising uses have appeared, such as real-time monitoring of when a fetus kicks Mom's tummy, or for surgeons communicating with residents during brain surgery. Yikes!

The remote sensor-based tweets a la Kickbee seems like an area with some useful potential. The article talks about the automatic production of tweets, but there could also be automatic processing of tweets at the receiving end too. The message size would limit the amount of semantic markup you might want to use to automate processing of the incoming tweets, but I guess it could be compressed prior to sending. It would also be possible to send a long message that spans multiple tweets, or just allow for larger message size.

Check out this Google tech talk from 28 Sep 2008:

HealthMap: Digital Disease Detection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J31z8_dzp54&feature=channel

Objectives:

* Using internet-based data sources to enhance surveillance of infectious disease outbreaks

* Achieve a unified and comprehensive view of global health

* Free and open resource (open source, open API)

I just created a wiki article with some links about Andrew Keen's opinions:

http://hub.teamhuman.org/tribes/tribe/internet/wiki/AndrewKeen

My take is that the internet is not necessarily a threat to human culture. It all depends on how we use it. So really he is cautioning about what he sees as bad usage patterns, not that the web is somehow intrinsically evil.

Hammers are quite useful, but we don't all go around with hammers all day trying to 'fix' various things we find. And knives are great too, but we try not to let the kids play with them. The internet is just another tool we've created, which will have good and bad uses ranging from awesomely useful to inappropriate to harmful.

We're still in the early days of figuring out the best ways to use the web. So we're in an important exploratory phase where we will learn the best way to put it to use, which may require eventual re-architecting and regulation. But in the mean time, we should keep playing, keep discussing, and take good notes.

(Technical aside: Testing whether wikiwords work here, if so, this will link to the aforementioned wiki particle: AndrewKeen ).