So from the comments and questions raised there from my previous post, I decided to take things into my own hands and see what I could find.
I found this article on CNN talking about how at Johns Hopkins, they were actually following tweets to track the flu that hit hard earlier this year.
As mentioned in the article, this completely circumvents the issue of "lag" from getting reports from hospitals from across the country where the CDC gives out 2 week old information in its monthly Flu-reports.
This use of twitter in research actually makes a lot of sense. The issue with tweets is that they're limited to 140 characters, so there really is a limit to the amount of content via tweet. But its value could be when analyzed in volume. The small size of each post allows for one to go about a larger number of tweets as compared to reading full articles. Also, when something is viewed in volume, researchers are hoping to find trends and correlations. Twitter has already taken advantage of this aspect of its mass use via Hashtags. Hashtagging allows for the organization of information so that "trends" could be followed.
If this is the case, I can very easily see a new job being developed in PR departments where someone is following current trends to work that into their companies. To me, it seems like the skills required to do that sort of a job would be very strong organizational skills, and an understanding of the technology. Could this be the a development of a "twitter librarian?"
Now this is only one article and one example of how twitter is being used, but I mean if I was able to find that in 5 minutes, I'm certain this is something that is happening more often. This actually got me pretty excited as this seems to be an example of how being creative can really give you something from... well not quite nothing, but 140 characters.
Very interesting perspective Will! I remember when Myspace first came out and thought it was so cool that my picture was on my own website (myspace page) and it was totally free. Really we were all feeding the social media machine and now we can find such interesting social trends and health trends such as the CNN influenza article you posted. The best part for the user is that it is no cost to us, and it is incredibly accessible, half the time we don't even have to get out of bed to make a post. With over 340 million tweets a day and its ease of accessibility, I'd expect those that don't go to the doctor and leave their flu officially unreported might informally update twitter about their flu which can be useful.
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