Tracking Swine Flu in China on Twitter

By John Kennedy

Swine flu for China so far is a chance to reflect [zh] on how SARS was prevented from becoming a pandemic, and the steps being taken now in Mexico and elsewhere.

Wang Jiadong has a post [zh] looking at how social media have been used to track the spread of outbreaks, from trending topics on the China Google to #hashmarks at the Twitter search engine, introducing the global Google swine flu map to his readers along with the QQ version.

The tech community at cnBeta have posted on the American CDC’s [zh] use of Twitter and YouTube to disseminate the latest information, and actively discussing the situation in the comments:

能评论吗

吃猪肉能传染么？

如果中国的什么疾病控制中心用QQ发布某信息…… 那估计很多人就要喷代谢产物 ~~ 你觉得呢？

看看人家国家~~再看看天朝gov 。差异啊~

就是你这种人…… 外国用所谓的这些软件发布就是潮流要是国内 用什么QQ发布 估计你就要来喷代谢产物 了! 不要看外国的月亮的时候那么崇拜 实际上你这么崇拜人家 人家未必把你当啥东西看

Twitter真是个肥猪流网站! 这么废品 的功能就想不明白为什么这么多人要用？？难道这就是外国人思想观念比较新的具体体现了？

差距是有的，但是和十几年前的中国比起来，现在进步了很多，应该鼓励不能嘲讽

An earlier cnBeta post [zh] noted that usage of the #swineflu had reached a rate of 10,000/hour. A commenter there points out that the @CDCEmergency Twitter account had already reached 25,000 followers, to which another reader writes:

中国非典，禽流感的时候，又不见消息这么灵通？好了，现在其它国家有疫情了，中国就哇哇哇地宣传。果真是那样，三句话总结新闻联播:前十分钟,领导们很忙;中十分钟,全国人民很幸福;后十分钟,世界上其他国家的人民都生活在水深火热之中。