In a previous post, I likened the blogosphere to the Internet's sensory system. In increasing measure, it is also becoming a critical part of the world's immune system.  The rapid response and containment of SARS in 2003 was due in part to an effort to scrape and mine data from multiple online sources into a Canadian system called GPHIN. By collecting incident reports and acting to isolate outbreaks, SARS didn't become a pandemic. Attention now turns to stopping a possible avian flu pandemic.

Larry Brilliant's TED wish this year is to expand GPHIN to a richer set of data sources: the blogosphere.  It seems to me that the GPHIN route may suffer from its bureaucratic entanglement (the Canadian government), and I'm leery about forestalling the end of the world using Microsoft software. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a lot of openness on the part of Brilliant or TED wish management to seriously consider alternatives. (If I see that they do, I'll be quick to report it.)

Fortunately, there are a number of efforts underway to mine the blogosphere for early detection and early response in a more open-system manner. These efforts are reported on in (of all places) the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and it's worth a look.