Pandora - create your own radio station from the Music Genome Project

EBay announces pre-filled forms for sellers -
December 2006
- building the semantic web one car boot at a time.

Journal of Biomedical Informatics : A taxonomic description of computer-based clinical decision support systems

Webreakstuff review: Apollo is seriously cool

Wiki Surgery

OGC is starting to Blog

Economist runs a story on switching from a corporate IT infrastructure to Google Apps:
Work-life balance

Different voices. Making the case for electronic records - Entrusting our medical records to NHS computers

As Bob Young says '[Medical Records] have been structurally unequal to the task of coping with modern medicine for at least 25 years. They are often unsafe and are a significant obstacle to improving the style, substance and location of care.

Nor are they secure and confidential. When we introduced electronic records with role-based access control it was the myriads clerical and support staff that raised most objections — because their view was now restricted to the limited parts of the record essential to their role.'

-

Jon Udell A conversation with John Halamka about health information exchange

What is so interesting about this podcast is the way that fundamental technology and architecture decisions are determined by political and medical culture.

Federated trust relationships; SOA. 'In New England it is illegal for a clinician to gather information from other systems even if the patient has given consent.'

Opt-in - Patients are asked if they want to opt -in to data sharing. 96% of patients have agreed to share data within their local community. 40,000 patients; 10 patients a month run a security sudit on their data. Idea of patient as steward of their own data - very new in the US. (and the UK).

Continuity of Care Document - basic information in a transportable way. Commission for Certification of Healthcare Technology.

Outcomes measurement is an opportunity.

Semantic agreements work going on. Avoiding getting bogged down in taxonomy perfection.

ahic in google

One to watch: PLoS ONE : Publishing science, accelerating research

Against an overstructured web. I'd lost the details of a friends work address - he's a GP in Herefordshire. I searched nhs.uk in a couple of ways but didn't find it. So I searched Google and did.

No criticism of nhs.uk, but of the dream of the semantic/structured web which (if it ever succeeded) puts at risk the very thing that has made the web work so far.

Wengo

O'Reilly Radar is betting on OpenID

Microsoft invented RSS and I'm the King of France. Seriously, which bit of this are Microsoft claiming ownership over - RSS, APIs, platforms, syndication? It reminds me of the time BT claimed ownership of hypertext linking.

The flight is now over Wales, about 50 miles from where we live. Almost home.

Airline Mashup - nice mashup between Fboweb (which looks a pretty nifty site for realtime aviation tracking) and Google Earth, which produces the results shown above

Vanilla! - stylish discussion board

NICE - Implementation tools useful, but would have been more useful with an RSS feed.

Yugma Free Web Conferencing

I have just taken delivery of Intervention by Denise Caruso and am looking forward to reasding it. This is the first lulu published book I have and the first impression of the printing and binding is very favourable. One nice surprise. The first bok in slecte further reading is The Emergence of Probability, a favourite of mine.

Nick Carr: Your new IT budget: $10

Kim Cameron Firefox support for Windows CardSpace

Mashup demos : Access Hotmail in a Google Gadget

kapow has a mashup server

Caspar Bowden (Microsoft) Transparency and Privacy

Salesforce Application Exchange has a 24 hour health clinic application

O'Reilly: Google's Geographic Layer
This could fun.

AJAX applications don't need to break the back button - add state to the browser back button.

I would like my personal health reord to be online and available if necessary. I have created a record in assportMD and will also create one in Healthspace . Next I will try to find out what the NHS knows about me. This leaflet describes how to do it. I espcially like the bit that says

What if my records have been lost?
Unfortunately, this does happen from time to time. If your records were electronically stored, it should be possible to obtain a print out. If, however, manual records have been lost, it will not be possible to reconstruct your medical records.

CogMap: The Org Chart Wiki is a web 2.0 style org chart creator.

Socialtext is firing on all cylinders. See this wide ranging interview with CEO Ross Mayfield and also, the launch of Socialtext unplugged, a realistic sounding solution to the online/offline problem. A logo is needed to indicate when a web application is in off-line mode. This is the best I have seen.

O'Reilly: Book Search Should Work Like Web Search

Wikia unveils OpenServing - Wikia Central - A Wikia wiki
open, free "the mother of all freebies" rom the founder of Wikipedia.

NHS Chief Executive releases podcast - oy!

NHS Chief Executive releases podcast - oy!

Opening up datasets - the results can be mixed as Swivel shows. But it is better to be transparent and deal with the consequences.

PRESS RELEASE Socialtext Releases SocialPoint: "We are beginning to use Socialtext in our Center for Integrated Health Science Education and Practice to work collaboratively on new ways of educating healthcare workers,' said Ken Graetz, eLearning Officer at Winona State University, Minnesota. 'We are also very excited about the possibility of integrating Socialtext with our growing Microsoft SharePoint installation. Combining the structure of SharePoint with the open, flexible features of Socialtext's wiki is a great solution for supporting teamwork.' "

Mashup of the day: EpiSPIDER

Open Source Software - a primer for health care leaders (PDF) Quote: Conditions are fertile for open source solutions to take root in health care.

I'm continuing to back up my hard disk on Amazon at the cost of 1 cent a month. Very nice. This article take the argument to a new level. Amazon is also offering an on demand computing service called ECC (Elastic Computing Cloud). The US Defence Systems Agency has been playing with it and concluded that it could get the same result from Amazon for $5 as it was getting from in-house kit costing $30,000. If the security issues with ECC ever got resolved maybe Amazon could host some NPfIT services, as long as BT can keep the N3 joint running.

» Web Office Widgets it looks as if Pageflakes has beaten Google to issuing a Writely widget.

2006, Brought to You by You - New York Times: (free subscription needed) "The entertainment business is already nostalgic for the days when it made and relied on big stars; parts of the public miss a sense of cultural unity that may never return. Instead both have to face the irrevocable fact of the Internet: There’s always another choice."

Askville Blog
is here

The Open Rights Group : Gowers Review
generally supportive

Low Cost Technology is Key to Improve Healthcare Frances Mair: "Web-cam consultations' could also enable healthcare professionals to monitor patients which chronic conditions such as asthma in their own homes.'"

Healthcare via IPTV - TVover.net: "Dreampark, a provider of IPTV Middleware in the European market, together with its project collaborators, was awarded the Healthcare IT Prize for 'Best Idea.' The prize was presented at the Annual General Meeting and national conference of the Swedish Society of Medicine. In collaboration with other participants in the project, Dreampark has developed an IPTV solution that enables patients to communicate with their local care center via the 'Nurse (Syster) Gudrun' interactive television channel. "

TonicPoint: powerpoint in a browser

Intramash between Google Co-op subscription and Custom Search: Google Custom Search: Specialized results in your search engine

Intel Develops Mobile WiMAX Chip: "'Our aim with WiMAX is to provide personal anytime/anywhere broadband connectivity,' said Hofer. 'This is a step along the way. We're at a point where, in 2007 and 2008, you're going to start seeing product samples.'"

software as service: Ex Libris - SFX - SFX eXpress

Ex Libris - SFX - Scholar SFX - more or less a free resolver for use on Google Scholar

A different business model for document delivery. - Oren Sreebny's Weblog: [ECAR 2006] John Willinsky - Sustaining Access to Knowledge and Scholarly Publishing notes that Google is offering to scan back copies of journals and share adword advertising revenue with publishers. Only one journal has taken this up.

Also notes: The situation is one of corporate concentration. John Wiley just offered to [now has] purchase[d] Blackwell. This creates a publishing house of 1200 journals. Reed-Elsevier, 2000 journals, etc. 6000 titles owned by four corporate entities. Libraries are having to buy in bundles of titles, having to sign non-disclosure agreements on the pricing. Only very few of those bundles allow you to cancel single titles.

open medical questions - Askville - Topic: medical

Amazon launches Askville

Wonderful Wizardry of ‘Woz’ - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine): "GS: Talk about coaxing; it took me probably eight months to get Steve Wozniak to tell me how the word “apple” came up. He was resistant to talking about it. And finally, the story came out. He had picked Steve Jobs up from the airport. And Steve Jobs had been living in a commune up in Oregon that was an apple orchard. So that was just the name that popped into his head, coming out of the commune — apple. And they both loved it. And think about how fresh that name was in 1975. They had the immediate concern — what about Apple records?
RU: … which only recently became a problem.
GS: Steve Jobs said “No, that’s music. This is computers. How could that possibly be a problem?”"

Can Xythos Simplify Basic Document Services? - this note includes an updateon various initiatives in web based document management services.

Cooksey Review: A new role for librarians :

7.59 The Review recommends the establishment of a pilot programme, under the joint auspices of the NHS SDO programme and the NHS’ Connecting for Health ‘National Knowledge Service’, to examine the effectiveness of employing a small number of full-time ‘Knowledge Transfer Champions’ to disseminate the findings of health services research and facilitate early adoption of those findings into routine practice in the NHS. It will be important to develop an appropriate system of metrics from the outset to accurately assess the effectiveness of this pilot programme. Should it prove successful, the programme could be extended to include wider knowledge transfer functions within the NHS, such as the dissemination and implementation of NICE guidelines.

Jon Udell: Hunting the elusive search strategy: this could be about librarians - "Last night an old friend who runs a small software company confessed a secret. When he and his staff answer technical questions for clients, they are often 'only' searching Google. At one point, he even asked a client: 'Do you really want us to search Google for you at $100/hour?' Yes, in fact they did. My friend thought that was crazy. I suggested that it's not as crazy as it sounds. Effective search depends on reservoirs of tacit knowledge and unconscious skill. Some people possess much deeper reservoirs, and/or can tap into them more effectively, than others. That makes them valuable."

David Austin asks - "Imagine a library containing 25 billion documents but with no centralized organization and no librarians. In addition, anyone may add a document at any time without telling anyone. You may feel sure that one of the documents contained in the collection has a piece of information that is vitally important to you, and, being impatient like most of us, you'd like to find it in a matter of seconds. How would you go about doing it?"

Combining CardSpace and OpenID

Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective: An RSS Journal Alerting Solution

Sxip Identity has some new products including a Salesforce add-in.

Johannes Ernst: Identity landscape

Phil Windley is blogging Identity 2.0

Personalising Firefox

As you know, Firefox has a 'ton' of downloadable add-ins called extensions. One of the best is Book Burro, which compares the price of a book on a web page. But what happens if you load 200 extensions into Firefox? Cybernet has found out.

Google Librarian Center - Article 12/2006 - 3
TH: I have heard that you are working with Ingenta and EBSCO on some form of linking from Google Scholar results. Can you explain what you are doing and why?

AA: The Library Links program requires participating libraries to have a link resolver. However, only a small fraction of libraries worldwide have link resolvers, and this number is growing fairly slowly even though Ex Libris provides ScholarSFX, a limited-feature link resolver as a free and hosted solution. This leaves a large number of researchers unable to take advantage of what their libraries have licensed as a part of their normal search workflow. We’re trying to figure out ways to solve this problem. As a part of this, we’re working with providers including Ingenta and EBSCO. This effort focuses on libraries that don't have link resolvers. Participating libraries that do have link resolvers should see no change.

Gowers - Recommendation 9: Allow private copying for research to cover all forms of content.
This relates to the copying, not the distribution, of media.

More on Gowers: Accordingly, the relevant copyright exception
should be extended to allow passages from works to be made available to students by email
or VLE without infringing copyright.17 However, right holders have a legitimate interest in this
field and so such an exception should not have effect where a licensing scheme is in place.

This should mean that NHS staff studying at a university or college can receive copies of study material as e-mail attachments. The CLA will need to include this right in their licence agreements.

The Gowers Review confirms what the CLA denies, namely that a rule of thumb for non-commercial copying exists:
3.27 UK copyright law provides a number of ‘exceptions’ to the broad rights granted to the
owner of a copyright work to enable ‘reasonable’ use to be made of the work freely and
without permission. While the public are generally unaware of these exceptions (some of
which fall under the rubric of ‘fair dealing’), perhaps the best-known example is the rule of
thumb that an individual may photocopy an excerpt from a book of not more than one
chapter, or 5 per cent (whichever is the least), without infringing copyright. While the
exceptions are restricted to particular acts, the USA has a similar doctrine of ‘fair use’ which
is more flexible in its application.

Gowers
4.75 The Review believes it is possible to create a very limited private copying exception
without a copyright levy.63 If rightholders know in advance of a sale of a particular work that
limited copying of that work can take place, the economic cost of the right to copy can be
included in the sale price.

Gowers
4.74 Under the Information Society Directive, countries are able to enact a private copying
exception provided that ‘fair compensation’ is given to rights holders.62 In France, Germany
and many other countries levies are exacted on hardware and blank media. One of the main
problems with levies is that they are blunt instruments: the amount is fixed and therefore does
not reflect the number of times a device is used, nor can it compensate for each individual
copy. It is also not clear that royalties are accurately remitted to rights holders as it is very
difficult to determine whose music is being copied. The European Commission is reviewing
the entire body of copyright law, and is specifically investigating whether levies work. (my emphasis)

Goweres Report on Intellectual Property: "In conclusion, the Review finds the arguments in favour of term extension
unconvincing."

Tamagotchi Dashboard
For anyone tired of the Red-Amber-Green game of manangement reporting, Jason Gorman is proposing the Tamagotchi dashboard. This would have the benefit of forcing the manager to do something to stop the little Tama getting very very cross, or dying. One little sophistication - the tama would not allow problems to be slipped into the next financial year as a way of restoring tranquality to the organisation.

iUpload: Content Management Meets Corporate Blogging

This article predates Web 2.0 but has a 2.0 feel to it.

National Library for Health: Inter Library Loans Systems Evaluation Report

Whtever happened to...the NHS COmmon Basic Specification

Alex Bunardzic: Replacing Service Oriented Architecture with Resource Oriented Architecture.

Remember The Milk is a really nic e example of mash-ups and the benefits of open architecture. RTM is becoming quite a strong platform for Getting Things Done

Andrew McAfee: Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology: "Function IT encompasses technologies--such as spreadsheet and word-processing applications--that streamline individual tasks. Network IT includes capabilities like e-mail, instant messaging, and blogs and helps people communicate with one another. Enterprise IT brings with it approaches such as customer resource management and supply chain management and lets companies re-create interactions between groups of workers or with business partners. Different types of technology bring about different types of organizational change, and managers should tailor their own roles accordingly. Categorizing IT in this manner can help leaders determine which technologies to invest in and how they can assist organizations in making the most of them"

Resistance to change. It's like....everywhere

Tim Berners Lee: timbl's blog: "In the research library symposium I learned that even some on-campus researchers find it easier to buy books thru Amazon than to use their campus library."

Bookprice - comparison shopping for books

Adam Bosworth, Head of Google Health, has started blogging again.

Identity 2.0

excellent flash video here

SOA and Web 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe: My best prediction for the future of Web 2.0 and SOA?  It's not that there will be a SOA 2.0, but rather a resurgence in interest in effective, simple, Web-aligned models for information creation, sharing, and management.  In the end, it's small pieces, loosely joined that has worked best over and over again.  As Grady Booch pointed out (read the Systemantics entry) a little while back, all complex systems generally start out as simple systems that worked.