For critical emergency management services it is imperative to have information on a timely basis. It can take a long time to deploy people to an area to of concern before you get real time information on what is happening so why not get up to date information on twitter or blogs that is produced by citizen journalists at the scene. This is one of the tools used by LAFD firefighter Brian Humphrey to keep an eye on trends and issues that might affect emergency management according to Wired Magazine.

Furthermore, by monitoring disease trends as reported by social and traditional media world wide, researchers and citizens can gain an understanding of what issues they might face next. If you (or your manager) needs convincing that this would be a helpful tool you should check out the talk given by Larry Brilliant at the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference in 2006.

A good place to learn about some tools that can help with this exercise is the WebIntel blog where they have published their “Top Five Health & Disease Monitoring and Warning Sources”. Incidentally, there are actually seven tools provided, now that’s value!