Today my colleagues at Gavagai, blogs about the trends of the common cold. Since people are not shy on sharing when feeling ill in social media, this can be used as a quite good indicator for public health.

I have about 60 GB of Swedish blog data. Not just because I’m a web crawler freak and/or creep, but because that I use it in my work on finding emerging words in the Swedish language. The nice thing about this data is that it has metadata of where people are writing from.

This data therefore be used in visualizing the cold trends spatially, and of course – in what better way than a gif?

Cold trend of 2013 in Sweden

Cold trend of 2013 in Sweden

See how people stops talking about colds symptoms in June? And as soon as kindergarten opens again, hell breaks loose again.

You might also be able to get a feel for how symptoms travels between cities if you squint.

And don’t mind the chronically ill blogger in Sundsvall that makes that look like a hot zone…