BigShinyThing

Brilliant. WhoIsSick.Org mashes up Google Maps with user-contributed data about who is unwell, where they are, and what ails them.

And has an inspiring origin story as well:

The genesis of the idea for Who Is Sick was actually from an acute need that our founder had when his wife started experiencing severe stomach pain while they were on vacation. With no way of knowing whether the pain was from appendicitis, food poisoning, or some other stomach illness, our vacationing couple went to the emergency room and waited for 4 hours (BTW – this was from 11pm until 3am) to be seen by a doctor…only to be told that there was a stomach flu going around and that if the pain didn’t go away in 24 hours, to come back. Wow. 4 hours wait for that…in the middle of the night… (of course the doctor did check to see if it was appendicitis so they weren’t all bad…).

Our founder thought, “if only there were a website that had current AND local sickness information, maybe we could have avoided the long wait.” Needless to say, this started the wheels spinning and a couple of months later, Who Is Sick was born.

There’s obviously a way to go before this becomes a seriously useful epidemiological early-warning system — self selecting reporters, and rudimentary demographics aren’t the researcher’s best friends! And we seriously hope that they don’t get sued by Trivial Pursuit for their wedge-based symptom-reporting tools. But, like many of the best mashups, the idea is in retrospect so obvious and, well, right that it seems amazing that no-one has done this before. Expect bigger, shinier versions of this to pop up all over the web until someone gets it just right. Don’t expect that someone to be the NHS, mores the pity!

[Via Search Engine Journal]