wonderful screencast - IBM's QEDwiki as a mashup platform

Pillhelper - outsourcing parts of your healthcare

The EVIE user needs assessment provides further evidence of the dominance of big-simple solutions to academic search needs. And the importance of brands.

It's still not too late for librarians and suppliers to get the messages coming out from surveys such as this one. But the suspicion must be that we're not yet hearing what users are telling us.

Does pay for performance (aka points mean prizes) work? The New England Journal of Medicine has its doubts

A lot of interest in some of the activities of the American Association of Publishers, which includes our colleagues Wiley, who sell Cochrane Library back to the body that funds its production. The AAP has taken on an attack style PR agency to counter the Open Access movement. Curiously, the UK branch of said agency includes a slew of ex civil service comms staff.

Yochai Benkler "Radical decentralization of intelligence in our communications network and the centrality of information, knowledge, culture, and ideas to advanced economic activity are leading to a new stage of the information economy— the networked information economy." From The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (link is the full text 3Mb+ pdf)

Identity Management: "Doc says they need a Dave Winer, but I don't think he understands that the reason I was able to make RSS 2.0 stick was that for a brief period I controlled all sides of the technology and could create consensus over a cup of coffee, with myself. I could have a conference in the morning, write the code in the afternoon, and ship it the next day. Seems there's no equivalent opportunity in identity, which was already a contentious, fractured and divided world, before the Internet even existed."

wikiCalc goes live.

Medline simplified - Relemed. We'd never have got here without Google.

EBay is building up its Trust system - Feedback 2.0

IBM to release social software - Lotus Connect.

I'm trying wikiseek, which has a clean interface. The results though are a bit of a muddle. Separating results from different sources behind tabs might help users. Some strange advert suggestions too.

Editorial on NPfIT from Australian Journal of Medicine:

Clinical knowledge services are an early clinical winner. Almost ignored in the CfH program hype has been the NHS National Knowledge Service which provides, among other things, the electronic National Library for Health — a vast array of evidence sources for working clinicians. With no apparent significant delays in its delivery, no dependence on other components of CfH, and a relatively small budget by the program’s standards, it is likely that the IT system most clinicians see first and gain immediate benefit from will be Internet access to clinical evidence.

I have tried to switch this blog to the new and improved blogger service, without success so far. This is having some odd knock-on effects as I have both a Google and a blogger acount.

Here are some Health Care Start Ups , from the Sun Start Up Camp.

This site has some add-ons for Google Reader. I moved to Google Reader from Internet Explorer's built in RSS reader which seemed to have a lot of latency built in. The new Google Reader has been fine.

Stuart Weibel on Google Book Search and Libraries: "It is difficult to resist Keller’s assertion that Google Book Search (GBS) is likely to revolutionize access to books more than any single factor in the library world – if not directly, then indirectly. It would be hard to be a librarian and not find chagrin in this realization. Keller rightly urges us to focus on the larger picture and the many benefits."

Cisco's call on its iPhone Trademark dispute with Apple: "Fundamentally we wanted an open approach"

Update on Chandler - open source desktop PIM - and Cosmo - calendar server: Open Source Applications Foundation Blog

Not a iPod with a phone strapped on, but an Internet device. Hopefully a true internet device that keeps the user permanently connected to the mother ship and takes away some of the technical and financial pain that even good smart phones such as the MDA inflict on their users.

Time to start making widgets for the Apple - iPhone - Internet

UKPMC
is launched - a platform for opening up access to UK biomedical research.

Under the Radar » Blog Archive » Under the Radar - Call for Companies!

in the area of

• Organize - Task Manager, Database, Project, notes
• Collaborate - Group Manager, Spreadsheets, Word Processing
• Track - Time Tracking, Bookmarks, Expenses, Budgets, HR
• Publisher - Blog tools, Web publishing, Feeds
• Communicate - Email, IM, VOIP, Voice, web conferencing
• Manage - Document Mngt, File Send and Manage
• Create - Presentation Mngr, music, photo edit/manage
• Personalize - Desktop, Calendar, personal organizers
• Search - vertical, enterprise, create your own
• Sync It - online/offline
• Mashups – DIY Software

Google Operating System: Google Calendar Sync for Windows Mobile Devices

This article (thanks Jon) - Patterns and inconsistencies in collaborative tagging systems - is broadly supportive of the value of informal tagging systems when compared to formal indexing systems. There should be some interest later this year in the quality of indexing of medical records. The argument is already about the training and number of indexers. But at least one person has pointed out that despite huge investment the definition of terms remains uncertain. I know from the anonymised data in the primary care QMAS system that the indexing of even fairly clear conditions such as heart failure is so varied as to render indexing of doubtful value.

Daylife launches

Most info searches are useless

The title of this piece suggests that Web searches are useless but this is inaccurate. The main parts of this story are:

- middle managers spend up to 3 hours a day looking for information
- they fail much of the time because the information they need is scattered and sometimes sequestered behind departmental 'firewalls' (40% of respondents thought that colleagues in different departments were unwilling to share)
- information tends to be stored in non-collaborative places
- IT workers are the least likely to find valuable information

Coming soonish: 37TB hard disk

Review - OpenID vs the Identity Systems of Yahoo, Google and MSN

turn you ca into a wi-fi hotspot: AutoNet Mobile

Ted Byfield: A Brief History of Information Interesting take on the recent debate about who invented RSS. It seems that Claude Shannon's ideas about informaion were preceded by RA Fisher of all people. Fisher - eugenicist and 'father' of modern statistical theory, has a digital archive here. His biography illustrates the complex relations between eugenics, statistics and social science.

Web Worker Daily Ajax Start Pages Reviewed. Useful review which concludes that none of them are up to the job yet.

Dojo has issued an Offline Toolkit for Web applications.

In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google - New York Times: "Since the beginning of 2004, venture capitalists have put nearly $350 million into no fewer than 79 start-ups that had something to do with Internet search, according to the National Venture Capital Association, an industry group."

Web 2.0 is a heady mixture of people, technology and money. At some point there is bound to be a crash as one of the pillars holding it up fails. How clever to predict when. But better still to predict what will survive the crash.

Walt Crawford update on Open Content Alliance and Google Book Search