The government is using social media to save American lives from a potentially fatal infection.
As goes the old maxim, knowledge is power. The power to protect yourself from the H1N1 virus, better known as swine flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently began using sites such as Twitter and YouTube to teach the public how to identify symptoms of the condition. Sir Francis Bacon would be proud.
Apparently the YouTube videos are 'nothing fancy,' according to Janice Nall, the CDC's director of e-health marketing. 'We're just trying to get the content out in video format,' she told InformationWeek.
The CDC's videos have gotten approximately 100,000 hits so far. But that's on their website. On YouTube, they've gotten over 2 million.
The CDC also has several Twitter feeds. According to InformationWeek, there are about 700,000 tweeters consulting the information they release.
While YouTube has been around for while, Twitter is relatively new on the scene. The site has become enormously popular as people seem to love exchanging information via the micro-blog. The site received much attention last June when Iranian protesters used its service to express themselves during the country's presidential election.
As goes the old maxim, knowledge is power. The power to protect yourself from the H1N1 virus, better known as swine flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently began using sites such as Twitter and YouTube to teach the public how to identify symptoms of the condition. Sir Francis Bacon would be proud.
Apparently the YouTube videos are 'nothing fancy,' according to Janice Nall, the CDC's director of e-health marketing. 'We're just trying to get the content out in video format,' she told InformationWeek.
The CDC's videos have gotten approximately 100,000 hits so far. But that's on their website. On YouTube, they've gotten over 2 million.
The CDC also has several Twitter feeds. According to InformationWeek, there are about 700,000 tweeters consulting the information they release.
While YouTube has been around for while, Twitter is relatively new on the scene. The site has become enormously popular as people seem to love exchanging information via the micro-blog. The site received much attention last June when Iranian protesters used its service to express themselves during the country's presidential election.
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