Hard news. Hard science. It sounds important — sometimes boring — but mostly important. It usually involves hard professions like doctors, scientists, or police officers.

Social media isn’t just fun and games. There’s a hard aspect — a serious aspect — to it, too.

Once instance of this is Google Flu Trends. This is certainly applicable surrounding the spread and fear over H1N1.

Millions of users around the world search for health information online, and there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. Google has found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms.

Here is a video explaining how it works:

I find this fascinating and full of potential for other applications. Google’s ability to do this in almost real-time rests on the fact that they are, well, Google. They have all the information. Still, as open source ideas progress and data becomes more widely available, I’m interested to see how this kind of information can be applied both online and off.

This is important for communicators of all stripes for how online tools can be leveraged for serious things. After all, there’s always room for the fun things, isn’t there?

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