TUSCALOOSA, AL – The Health Care Communication and Social Media community from Twitter has launched a Web site to aggregate information feeds from social, government and traditional media concerning the swine flu.

HCSM is a Twitter conversation community that collaborates each week to discuss best practices from social media leaders and movers and shakers in healthcare communications and marketing fields.

"After discussing 2009 H1N1 (swine) flu communication strategies on Sunday night, the HCSM Twitter conversation community decided that having related social media and news feeds aggregated in one place would be useful for HCSM members and organizations," said HCSM co-founder and moderator Dana Lewis.

The 2009 H1N1 (swine) flu Web site requirements were suggested by the HCSM community and implemented by Tom Stitt and Stew Apelzin, managing directors at Aperial, which develops BlokCast, an RSS feed aggregation service focused on healthcare markets.

HCSM participants include physicians, administrators, public information managers, Web services managers, editors, bloggers, writers and consultants.

"We thought it would be useful for healthcare organizations and state/local healthcare departments as well as local government offices that manage emergency services to have one Web Site that aggregated relevant RSS news and social media feeds about the 2009 N1H1 (swine) flu," said Stitt.

The 2009 H1N1 (swine) flu Web site was built using Drupal, an open source content management framework. Followers in the HCSM community suggested authoritative RSS news feeds from governmental organizations and traditional media as well as social media feeds from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

"We're excited to use technologies like Drupal to build BlokCast and work with HCSM to showcase the benefits of social media for addressing real-time healthcare communication requirements," said Stitt.