This week marks the debut of what's intended to be a weekly series of illness forecasts from a Baltimore start-up company called Sickweather.
You'll find the pilot episode nearby, via YouTube. Sickweather says the nation's seeing flu, colds and some other seasonal maladies this week. That's no real surprise, but hold off on a hasty diagnosis of "duh!" - for the company says it has a patent-pending process that "distills data from Facebook and Twitter to generate real-time 'weather maps' of illnesses, so users can see what's going around."
Depending on the sponsorship dollars that Sickweather can generate, it may begin offering regional forecasts, according to a press release quoting company CEO Graham Dodge.
The pilot video is hosted by meteorologist Justin Berk and features epidemiologist Jennifer Schroeder. It does somewhat resemble a traditional TV weathercast, but branches off into medical territory.
StarNet site visitors, take a look and give us your feedback. Is this something you'd want to see each week on StarNet? Do you believe Facebook and Twitter can have this kind of predictive power? Please leave your thoughts in the reader comments.
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