Google just launched an updated version of Google Flu Trends , a service that predicts flu trends by tracking flu related queries on the company's search engine. Until now, Google only showed aggregate data for states in the United States. Starting today, Flu Trends will show data down to the city level for 121 cities . As Google notes in today's announcement, this update was timed to coincide with the National Influenza Vaccination Week . Sponsor Google also offers Flu Trends data on a country level for Mexico , Australia, New Zealand and most of Western Europe. Data on Flu Trends is updated daily. By tracking flu-related queries, Google has already proven to be able to accurately predict the flu levels on the state and country level. It looks like Google now feels like its algorithms are accurate enough to predict influenza trends on a more granular level. Until Google is able to validate this data, however, the company is labeling the city level estimates as "experimental." Google and Google.org - Google's non-profit foundation - sponsor a number of influenza-related projects. Google, for example, now offers a vaccine-finding map and the company is working with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) to to give give scientists a place to collaborate and share research on influenza research on Google Knol . Discuss

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Google Launches Flu Trends For 121 U.S. Cities

If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program . The NWS has always solicited severe weather reports from the public. After all, no amount of technology can ever be a substitute for an accurate report of what's actually happening on the ground. Because of the new Twitter geolocation API and the increasing number of applications that support it ( TweetDeck for iPhone is the latest to add geotagging support ), it's become very simple for the public to submit severe weather reports and for the NWS to pinpoint where they happened. Sponsor How does it work? According to the program's documentation , a system monitors Twitter for tweets starting with the hashtag #wxreport . These tweets are then plotted on a Google map using the tweet's geolocation information, or in cases where the geotag data is not available, an approximation of the reporter's location within the tweet using the format WW [location] WW . Finally, the report is relayed to the appropriate NWS field office for use by the office's meteorologists in a variety of ways, including possible inclusion in an official storm report. It's not just the NWS that could benefit, either. The public already will be more informed simply by watching the #wxreport tag, regardless of whether one of those reports is released in an official storm report. Sites such as Weather Underground , which already hosts an extensive network of citizen-owned weather stations, could further integrate these reports into its own products. Media outlets monitoring Twitter for storm information can use the tweets in their own reporting; The Weather Channel already does a good job of this. You can see some of these reports in action today. Check out the Twitter search for #wxreport to see how much snow fell from a winter storm that's hit much of the U.S. We can't help but wonder what this search will look like once spring rolls around and the severe weather season kicks off. Hopefully, the NWS has the tools in place to handle a high volume of tweets and an effective way of dismissing hashtag spam and other Twitter nuisances. The National Weather Service program demonstrates how powerful geolocation on Twitter can be, and we can't help but wonder what else will be created with geolocated tweets . Look for even more creative uses of geolocation throughout 2010. Discuss

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Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted

Outlook users can now use email plug-in Liaise to automatically extract action items, delegation and priority levels from the free text of email conversations. This is software that's so cool it makes me jealous of Windows users. Liaise launched in September and won the Peoples' Choice Award for Enterprise Products at DEMO but is available to the public at large for the first time today. Sponsor In removing its Beta label, Liaise has added a few new features, including calendar integration, group collaboration and more user control over the UI. Check it out, I think if you're an Outlook user this is something you could really find useful. Discuss

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Use OutLook? Liaise Intelligent Assistant Available Now

Google just launched the Google Public DNS . Just like OpenDNS , Google Public DNS will allow users to bypass their ISPs Domain Name Servers (DNS). DNS servers are, in many respects, the backbone of the Internet. DNS allows you to type a domain name like www.senate.gov into a browser instead of a machine-readable IP number like http://156.33.195.33/ . Google argues that it wants to give consumers an alternative to their ISPs' DNS services in order to make the Internet "faster, safer and more reliable." Sponsor According to Google product manager Prem Ramaswami, the company's engineers have been working to improve DNS over the last few months. Instead of performing DNS lookups on an ISP's DNS server, Google will use its data-center and caching infrastructure to resolve these domain names. After SPDY (which augments HTTP), this is Google's second major project that touches upon the core infrastructure of the Web. Using Google Public DNS Google Public DNS uses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as its IP addresses. Advanced users will surely have no problem making the necessary changes to enable Google Public DNS. The company has also released a set of step-by-step instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux users that can be found here . A First for Google: Phone Support for a Free Product In addition, Google is also offering phone support, which, to our knowledge, is unprecedented. Given that a mistake in changing your DNS settings could easily make accessing the Internet impossible, this is probably a good solution in this specific case. Privacy According to Google's FAQ, the company will only keep temporary logs and erase all the information it collects through the public DNS service within 24 to 45 hours. The company promises not to keep any information that is linked to IP addresses in its permanent logs. As of now, it doesn't look like Google offers any additional services besides the pure DNS lookup. Unlike OpenDNS, it doesn't block malware sites or present users with a list of alternative addresses (and ads) if it can't resolve an address. Discuss

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Google Wants to Speed Up the Web: Launches Its Own DNS Service