A PACK, NOT A HERD? Hmm. Xeni Jardin reports in Wired News that people in Hong Kong are using text-messaging to avoid SARS:

Launched by Sunday Communications, the service allows subscribers with SMS-enabled phones to identify the “contaminated” buildings within a kilometer of their calling location. Subscribers can also learn which buildings visited recently by patients suspected of having SARS, or “atypical pneumonia,” as the disease is known throughout much of Asia.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can see something like this working as a sort of “smart quarantine.” On the other, given that the data it’s based on are incomplete and likely often inaccurate, I wonder if it really does any good at all. Quality of information is the key here, it seems to me. Of course, given that rumors, etc., are already flying around the nets, this may represent at least a small improvement in that department. If you read the whole story, you’ll see that both good and bad information are playing a role here. And there’s an interesting bit of technological influence:

“Because SMS notes are terse anyway, disinformation seems to spread even faster because you don’t get the whole story.”

Yeah, text-messaging isn’t good at nuance.