Back in the day when you wanted to keep track of a flu pandemic, you got your information from radio, television, print media, or some sort of online news portal. If you were a stickler for authoritative accounting over specious rumor mongering, you might have even gone directly to the Centers for Disease Control Web site. Of course the story has now changed. Flu tracking has now "gone all Web 2.0." I like to think the tide turned last November when Google released its Google Flu Trends site, which uses aggregated search data on flu-related search terms like "influenza" and "fever" to try to track and locate the spread of flu viruses. It was praised for providing much faster trending data than that provided by the Centers for Disease Control.

With the recent H1N1 (Swine) Flu outbreak in Mexico, Google has now added an experimental version of Flu Trends for Mexico. But this is only the beginning. This latest flu outbreak is also attended by a host of flu trend monitoring methods (widgets, feeds, apps, social media) to provide users up-to-the-second updates on how that global pandemic is tracking. Granted, unless you are some kind of disease pathologist by trade, up-to-the-second reporting may be a tad overkill. However, it’s there if you need it. Need a Swine Flu RSS dashboard widget for you Mac desktop? The Apple Store’s got you covered! Prefer a more agnostic platform? Why not try Feedzilla’s Swine Flu Widget, which provides a macabre color-coded map to distinguish outbreaks from deaths. And what about the iPhone, which only a few weeks ago celebrated a landmark one billion app downloads? Why yes. Of course. A Swine Flu tracking app is available.

Of course, with the plethora of instant information out there—some of it accurate and some dubious, some calm, and some hysterical—the CDC is obviously concerned about the accuracy of information people are receiving. So in a rather bold move (for the Federal Government), the CDC has opted to fight fire with fire by embracing social media. Twitter? Facebook? MySpace? Widgets? RSS? Mobile site? The CDC has all of that. Behold the Center for Disease Control’s Social Media page: http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/. I have to confess that I’m actually kind of impressed.