In October, new dialogue platforms on breast cancer will emerge through social media

The social media will, this year more than in any other, deck themselves out in pink, in October – opening up the door to dialogue between professionals and Internet users, on the subject of breast cancer. 

From October 3-28, the French Association for Cancer Research (ARC) will open an online platform, so that the general public can engage in discussion with four renowned researchers, on a variety of topics related to breast cancer. The new platform will be launched as part of Pink October, the month dedicated to official mobilisation against breast cancer, so as to raise awareness and inform Internet users on the subject. 

The address will be Questions-Chercheurs.com. Internet users will be able to connect and ask the researchers all of the questions they have on issues around prevention, risk factors, screening tools and treatment. The general public will also be able to ask questions on the site or via the ARC’s Facebook page. The most frequent questions will be channelled to the four researchers and answered. 

Periscopic, an infographic visualisation company, has concurrently developed Who's talking about breast cancer?, a lightweight real-time visualisation tool that picks up on all tweets relating to breast cancer. 

Through the DataVisualization platform, Episcopic invites the public to "download the application and take a look at what people are saying about breast cancer, amidst millions of tweets… and join in the chat directly”.

Collating and individually-displaying the 1,500 most relevant tweets published over the last seven hours elapsed, by the application makes it possible to visualise the most frequently re-tweeted, then explore their interactions intuitively, using 3 filters:

- The "Topics" filter, which makes it possible to view the keywords most frequently associated with the most re-tweeted messages;

- The "Stories" filter, which makes it possible to trace back the external hypertext links called to Internet users’ attention by the tweets;
- The "People" filter, which categorises Tweeter accounts by order of activity level on a specific topic, on the microblogging platform. 

Screen captures courtesy ofInfosthetics.com.