As I was reading the H5N1 reports this morning, it occurred to me to look at what I collected a year ago, so I marked up the log files with links by date. I’m not sure just what use this has –the initial thought was to compare the tracking of spread and reports of deaths, to make some sort of analysis of how the emerging story was being covered.

My collection of stories wasn’t systematic, and perhaps emphasizes the bizarre (trained ducks replaced with racing pigs in a Vietnamese circus, reported 6 February…). I was as interested in how the story was being presented, how the press was voicing its response to what it was being told by “officials” and by its own reporters, as in the sequence of events.

In 2005, the blogosphere is a much more effective means to track events and to find commentary on the larger issues. At the moment, I’m especially impressed by Effect Measure (which covers a broad range of epidemiology issues) , Pathogen Alert, and recombinomics.com, but I have also set up RSS feeds for influenzapandemic.blogspot.com, and for occurrences in technorati and yahoo news [the latter two provide URLs that could be used with any RSS aggregator]. I haven’t been following my Google News search very assiduously.