This is off my beat here at BlogHer, but it's bothering me, so here goes....

There's been much a-Twitter about the alarm surrounding the Swine Flu. People griping that SARS, Ebola, bird flu, [fill in the blank] didn't wind up being much, so why get worked up now? Everybody's over-reacting, they say.

I think the cynical response is overly-cynical and perhaps a bit to happy to declare "boy who cried wolf" and laugh or sneer.

Reality check:

Highly contagious? Check!

Fatal to healthy adults? Check!

No vaccine in sight before fall? Check!

Spreading quickly? Check!

This is a little thing that is very bad and could get very big very quickly. I don't see the alarm as overblown (though Egypt's destruction of all the pigs seems a bit ridiculous). We're an interconnected world now.

Shutting down the schools seems to be an obvious step. This is how you try to stop pandemic: By eliminating the mass-infection opportunities that we have.

If nothing comes of the swine flu, I think it could in part point to why such aggressive measures were indicated. It's if it gets really bad when we can say shutting the schools was perhaps too little too late.

So count me as skeptical of the proud, cynical skepticism out there. Just because you've run stop signs without consequences doesn't mean you want to continue doing it blithely.

/soapbox

Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision, and Twitters under the handle @lauras. This post is cross-posted at rare pattern.

Yesterday, Twitter turned three. A week before was my two-year Twitterversary. So that pretty much made me a late early adopter. And while I'm really enjoying Twitter now, back then I didn't get it. Not yet. Pretty much not at all.

I admit, these past few years I've pretty much rushed to sign up for any and every new online social or productivity service that sounded interesting. They all had strangely spelled (or simply strange) names like Flickr and del.icio.us and furl and Vox and Joost and Plurk. And those are the ones I remember, maybe even still use.

But pretty much most of them never stuck. It was just too hard to work them into my life. Too weird. Too difficult to use. And many I never tried out at all. Too uninteresting or too ... creepy, some of them.

When I signed up for Twitter, it was already something of a buzz in tech circles. I had looked at it for many months but never got around to actually signing up. It never really clicked in my head that it would be interesting. And after I did finally sign up, I found it alternatingly boring, distracting and challenging to work into my life. While I searched for people tweeting interesting things and followed them, I avoided anybody too prolific. At that point, following only people who posted a tweet an hour was about the max I could handle. A tweet or two a day was more like it. Otherwise I couldn't keep up.

In trying to make Twitter work for me, I did not follow people tweeting boring things, like "Drinking coffee" or "Waiting in line at the grocery store." (I still don't find that banality interesting. Who cares?) I was interested in people tweeting about interesting things – news, blog posts, events, or even just how they felt about that morning coffee or waiting in line at that moment.

Then something changed.

At some point, I crossed a threshold – a breakthrough point where I was no longer trying to track and read every single tweet of those I was following, and now getting a more impressionistic gestalt of the aggregate twittering. And I think that's the real trick about Twitter. You're a bird in a tree with thousands of birds around you, all tweeting. The tweets that interest you catch your attention. You may miss things, but the big stuff gets retweeted. And the more people you follow, the more sources that might toss out something interesting.

It's a liberating moment, when you reach this point in Twitter. You're freed from the need to track everything. What you catch you catch, and what you miss you miss (and likely would have missed anyway, if you weren't twittering at all).

It took a while, but Twitter eventually grew to take a place in my daily life that did not even exist before. There is no clear real-life (as in 3D, face-to-face) analogue. Twittering is communication in a way totally enabled by the technology, the applications. We simply could not be connecting transiently, ephemerally with so many people at the same time without being alone in a crowded room.

Now I'm using Twitter more and more, and while my Twittersphere has grown I've found Twitter to be ever more interesting and relevant to my life. But I was a late adopter, even after adopting, and stumbled quite a bit along the way. It can be a bit unnerving at times, especially on those occasions when someone unfollows me.

So if you're Twittering but not quite getting it, maybe you should try just diving in. Follow a lot of people. Browse. Engage.
And Tweet your passion.

And when you're too busy, don't worry about it. Twitter will be there when you're ready.

Here are some women you might want to follow:

• @kathysierra
• @blogdiva
• @laurennroth
• @agahran
• @thatwoman
• @webchick
• @add1sun
• @stacedout
• @pingkate
• @vdebolt
• @MichelleCox
• @AmyStephen
• @missrogue
• @gwenbell
• @mollydotcom
• @tresha
• @lauriewrites
• @LizaK
• @emmajanedotnet
• @leisa
• @lizriz
• @lizhenry
• @debroby
• @kanter
• @CaliLewis
• @zadi

Contributing Editor Laura Scott tweets as @lauras, and shares tweeting responsibilities for @pingv, @Drupal and @DrupalAssoc. When she's not Tweeting, she sometimes blogs at http://rarepattern.com and http://pingv.com.