Got Flu?

If you traveled to Mexico or Texas or California recently and you feel crappy, flu symptoms you mite want to get yourself checked out. This is because the Swine Flu has spread around in Mexico, Texas, California, Kansas, New York, and now Canada. Canada confirmed Six cases in two provinces, two in the western province of British Columbia and four in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. Swine Flu has killed as many as 81 and sickened possibly 1,300 more in Mexico. It first spread outside Mexico to Texas and California, where there have been at least eight reported nonfatal cases. Yesterday, two new cases were reported in Kansas, and there was a suspected outbreak in New York City which was confirmed today Sunday 26th. Most of Mexico's dead have been young, healthy adults, and none were over 60 or under 3 years old, this is a cause for alarm because this shows how deadly this flu could potentially be. The new Swine Flu strain contains gene sequences from North American and Eurasian swine flu viruses, North American bird flu, and North American human flu according to the CDC. Cases of the Swine Flu popping up across the North American continent has caused the WHO, World Health Organization, to call a meeting of specialists to decide what steps should be taken to contain the virus. WHO is also considering a recommendation for a declaration of an international public health emergency, which could have major implications on travel and trade. It could also raise its "pandemic alert level," currently at level three. It is the first time the committee has been called upon since it was created two years ago to handle disease outbreaks. This new flu has the WHO worried because it resembles the pandemic influenza, like the 1918 Spanish flu and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics often strike young, healthy people the hardest. The communication that is happening with this crisis is a good early out reach to the public by having the press present stories about the flu and the WHO, CDC, and NY state setting up informational websites and a 24 hour hotline for questions about the flu. The CDC also has a section on actions people can take to stay healthy. This Shows a active participation from the CDC and WHO with handling the possible outbreak and crisis.

YAY! another one of these site!

Who loves YouTube? I know I do, but I am not sure that I like Universal. Why I say this is because YouTube and universal joined together to create a new website for music videos called Vevo. Now this new website has some huge finical backers like Google and Vivendi not to mention YouTube and Universal music group. Vevo will be fully owned by Universal Music Group, a subsidiary of French media giant Vivendi, and the technology will be provided by Google. Revenue from Vevo will be shared between YouTube and Universal, as will revenue from Universal content hosted on YouTube. The goal of this website is to bring premium music video content to the viewers; this would allow Vevo to compete with the likes of Hulu. Now I see this as desperate act by YouTube because of the fact Hulu is doing so well with advertisements and the content they play is higher quality then what can be found on YouTube. I could see this new website working out well because many of the music video found on YouTube have been pulled or are poor quality that it’s not worth even watching. most of the people that I know that go to YouTube to “watch” music videos go there to hear the song not because of the video. This new website Vevo will have to use some intense advertising to get the word out to even try to dent the Hulu. This is because Hulu has some big stars in their commercials on the TV and most people that has cable TV most likely seen the commercials. A few of the big stars include Alex Baldwin and Seth MacFarlane (creator/ voices of Family Guy and American Dad). Now some of the ways I could see a massive advertising push for this new website is have Google put ads on their site, ads on YouTube, and the biggest ad push advertisement in Universal productions. I choose this news release to talk about because it has a new website being created, even though we cannot view the website while it is being created. This makes me think about chapter 14 and the steps to create a website and what will the target viewer want when going to this site. I do wonder how cluttered the main website will be with advertising and such, let alone the fact that when they do start advertising, I will not be surprised to see ads on my beloved Google.