Lets fight disease!

There was a pretty cool article in the New York Times about Google using search data to track Influenza breakouts up to 2 weeks before the CDC can. Pretty slick. There was an article in Wired magazine about a similar sort of thing a few months ago. The Wired article is about a Department of Defense project to point out potential localized epidemics quickly. Here's my favorite snippet of the article:

"We detected a gastrointestinal outbreak in Korea," Mansfield says. "I called my boss, and he asked me, 'When did it happen?'"

Korea is 13 hours ahead of Washington. So Mansfield simply answered: "Tomorrow."

We live in a pretty awesome age.

I wonder how well this kind of aggregated data (read: grouped so that no private info is kept) could be used for other topics more interesting to mainstream America, like politics or sports popularity. Or even music popularity. At least one site uses this kind of data for Operating System popularity.