Did they have flu epidemics in the Roman Empire?

Two pieces of news from the Google front:

• As reported by O'Reilly Radar, the Inquisitr, and Destination CRM Blog, it is possible to harness the search information within Google to track regional flu outbreaks. Face it, if a bunch of people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area start searching for "flu," perhaps something is up. I'll grant that the system can be gamed or otherwise malfunction - it will always seem like there's a flu epidemic in Milan - but it's still a good use of technology.


• As reported by Computeractive and ReadWriteWeb, Google Earth now features a historical view of Rome circa 320 AD.

Now of course we can't mash these two items up - the Romans in 320 AD weren't entering search terms - but perhaps this is a Google play which could eventually allow some nice mashups.

It's all about the stack, you know.

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