Social network mining

The website, which launched in November, mines social networking sites using a computer algorithm, and is able to tease illness trends out of a sea of social media-data.

Now data mining is nothing new among social networks, but this demonstrates how specific it is getting.

But for the past year, he and his partners have been nursing the startup dream with Sickweather, a site that aims to provide consumers with real-time information about illness trends in their communities across the country. The team is currently looking for early stage investors, but have already gotten media attention in the United States and England.

This information could be handy. But if you don't want it out there, don't complain about that headache.

I can see the downside of this too. That insurance companies and workman comps claims will now harness this information to use against patients.

The site could be a boon to health care providers and pharmaceutical companies, who can use it to advertise their products and services to a highly targeted audience: sick people who want to feel better as quickly as possible.

And there you have it. There is only one true green.

baltimore sun article on sickweather.com

www.sickweather.com...

sick being the operative word.worse than leeches for sucking the blood out of you.

I think what bothers me is this is a private company doing this, no matter how positive they paint their intentions to be. There is no regulation on this sort of thing, so you have private companies gathering your information, and using it to sell to other private companies.

Granted, there is no privacy on the net, but this feels like when your email is sold to a private company for spam, only even more personal.

Now I didn't see the article get into specifics on whether they collect personal information, or just overall data.