Top Five Swine Flu Information Sources

• The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dedicated site
• The World Health Organization (WHO) Disease Outbreak News
• WebMD set up Swine Flu Center with excellent facts and figures
• HealthMap (for a geographical overview of multi-source data)
• Google.org Flu Trends | Experimental Mexico Data*

30/04 Update: In the last few hours pandemicflu.gov has greatly improved its coverage and organization. I guess we are at Top 6.

Of course, most major news organizations have come up with dedicated spaces to the issue, which are not considered here.

*Google has created experimental estimates of flu activity in Mexico using aggregated search data. Unlike Google Flu Trends for U.S., this data has not been validated against confirmed cases of flu.

Social Media Search & Monitoring

Trying keep up with social networks and media outlets to perform routine brand protection, media monitoring, and protective intelligence tasks can be overwhelming. Two new services have come across our radar in recent weeks and are worth mentioning. YackTrack provides search capabilities for references and comments to a specific URL (post, page, etc.) as well as a keyword search (chatter) across multiple social networks. The service could be particularly valuable when attempting to track reactions and responses to a product announcement or PR blog post, where the option to turn the query into a feed would seem quite handy. WhosTalkin.com (recently reviewed on ReadWriteWeb.com) takes a more traditional search engine approach focused on the social web, with a plethora of sources. If it will keep the promise to soon offer the option to save searches and create RSS feeds, this tool could quickly become a must for Executive Protection operations and other Risk Mitigation professionals.

Top Five Health & Disease Monitoring and Warning Sources

Google made big news this week by launching Google Flu Trends – showing considerable Early Warning potential of search terms trends analysis. According to the NY Times, ‘early tests suggest that the service may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.’ This would seem like a good time to share our favorite open sources on the subject of global health and disease outbreaks:

1. CDC – The Center for Disease Control and Prevention publishes multiple feeds and updates.
2. HealthMap – A classic and beautifully-executed mashup of news sources, medical bulletins, and official alerts. Created by by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein.
3. ProMed-mail – A program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. Offers multiple email channel subscriptions.
4. MedISys – A real-time news alert system for medical and health-related topics maintained by the Health Threats Unit at Directorate General Health and Consumer Affairs of the European Commission.
5. Global Health Atlas – Maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO) which also publishes a Disease Outbreak News Feed (XML).

Honorable mention goes to Pandemicflu.gov – only excluded from the list above because of its more narrow focus – and HHS.gov by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Web Capturing and Archiving

A couple of years back, during a crisis management assignment, we experimented with a number of news monitoring options, with the intent to capture all articles, websites, blogs, etc. with references to the event, and make them immediately available to the client. Most solutions available at the time carried one or more serious drawbacks. Collaborative bookmarking tools often returned ‘non existing’ pages and screen captures would typically be limited by screen sizes and impossible to index. Iterasi, a new Web archiving service, would have made our lives a lot easier. The (currently) free service allows you to capture and archive any web page at any given moment. The added, built-in advantages are full text indexing, sharing, and automated capture scheduling. This is a great tool for OSInt, PR, competitive intelligence, crisis management operators.

Video Search Engines: Top 5 List

As video content continues to show exponential growth across the Web, it is still early to crown the best video indexing and search engine. We routinely check old and new directories and search engines comparing the results on obscure subjects and lesser known individuals to avoid ‘tag-spamming’ results. Our top five destinations include: Blinkx, Truveo, Google Video, MSN Video, and Online Video Guide (more valuable as a directory than as a search engine.) Feel free to let us know if we missed your favorite.

Who is Hosting Whom?

A new, free service allows anyone to identify who is the hosting provider for a specific website. There are of course more ways than one to figure out which provider is hosting a site you might be researching, yet Whoishostingthis seems to be tackling the task quite accurately and with little ‘marketing’ disruptions.

Corporate Dirty Laundry: Where is it Hanging?

Back in February we mentioned a few sources of corporate praise and blame. As we often emphasize, anyone involved in enterprise resilience today cannot underestimate the potential impact of rumors and proprietary information flowing through anonymous online forums or blogs. These are our favorite OSInt starting point:

• Anonymous Employer – This appears to be an actual business which claims to make an attempt to contact the company subject of an anonymous report. Although free, their goal is to provide consulting and technology for corporate communication. There is no company directory or name search which means a subscription is required for it to be of any use. On the plus side, it’s a ‘wait and see’ approach for corporate security since any complaint logged to the system would be directly forwarded to the employer.

• BossBitching: As the title suggests, mostly focused on individuals rather than companies as a whole. Most comments we saw bore no direct reference to people or companies and number of posts we found for search and browsing was exceptionally small. Only worth mentioning in light of potential, future expansion – today, it is of little or no value. >>>

Money Laundering: Reference Reports Update

Security and Legal departments of financial institutions and multinational organizations may want to take note of a couple of recent publications on the subject of money laundering. The International Monetary Fund just released a detailed assessment of Gibraltar Anti-Money Laundering (AMF) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) efforts. The report lists not only the core aspects of these activities but some of their shortcomings and various recommendations of good reference value. Also, earlier this month, The U.S. Departments of Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security issued the 2007 National Money Laundering Strategy, “a report detailing continued efforts to dismantle money laundering and terrorist financing networks and bring these criminals to justice.” Not be forgotten is the regularly-updated Specially Designated Individuals List maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the US Treasury.

Applegate: Early Warning & Crisis Management in the Web 2.0 Era

What some in Silicon Valley are now calling ‘Applegate’ – a serious Apple Inc, stock price fluctuation caused by an inaccurate blog announcement – is a perfect sample of crisis management (CM) challenges for public companies in the Web economy. For those who missed it, here is the short version of the May 16 events:

• At 11:49 AM EST, famed tech blog Engadget announces that, according to an internal Apple source, the highly anticipated iPhone and Leopard (Apple’s next OS version) will not meet the target release dates.
• Between 11:56 AM and 12:02 AM, Apple stock faces a brutal selloff, with prices going from $107.89 to $103.42 – equivalent to a 3% or about $4 billion loss in market capitalization.
• Within less than two hours, Apple PR responds stating that the email suggesting the delay was a fake and that products are on schedule. (The full sequence of events and the Engadget version of the facts is available here.)
• Apples stock bounces back within the day but not without a good number of angry investors calling for an SEC investigation.

The 1982 Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol crisis remains one of the great examples of effective management in the CM field. . .

Country Reports on Terrorism 2006

Since 2004, the US State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report has been replaced by the Country Reports on Terrorism. The reports, which are published annually by April 30 and are compiled with data provided by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), can be found here.