“We have been following innovative uses for social media in the biotech and healthcare industry here on the blog. Recently, a comprehensive paper was published in PLoS ONE outlining the use of “infoveillance” tools on the web to track the public response to the H1N1 epidemic. Dr. Gunther Eysenbach and Cynthia Chew, both researchers at Toronto’s Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, mined and archived over 2 million Twitter posts between May 1 and December 31, 2009. After carrying out an in depth analysis of these “tweets”, they validated Twitter as an effective medium to capture real-time content, sentiment, and public attention trends. Infoveillance methods include data mining, aggregation, and categorizations of online text and together form the toolkit for the new study of “infodemiology”. In the paper, Eysenbach points out that Twitter is particularly amenable to textual mining and analysis due to the concise nature of tweets that users share with their respective followers.”
Article
Mark Curtis, The Cross-Border Biotech Blog, 16 December 2010
Article (Chew 2010)
Article (Eysenbach 2009)
Article (Ginsburg 2009)
