Libraries in the NHS: August 2007

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Social Graph based searching comes to medicine......

and guess what?

... it's not very good!

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

The write-read-edit circuit on the web can be very public and very fast, as the exchanges over Robert Scoble's take on social search shows. One of the ironies of his presentation was that his vidwo wasn't going to be findable through a search engine. Original video via the screen below. Assuming Robert is wrong, the episode shows how difficult it is to think beyond Google. Just today Google got me pretty quickly to this book, which I've wanted to read for a while now.

Sxip is promoting OpenID Information Cards a phishing proof implementation of OpenID

Web Widgets - an introduction, and some problems they cause.

Dave Winer: Google and search "If Google is the Coke, who is the Pepsi?" - It isn't Microsoft, yet.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Jakob Nielsen casts a pragmatic eye on the implications for web sites on the dominance of search in Web usage in When Search Engines Become Answer Engines The good news for Google is that it still makes sense for web sites to accommodate search engine oriented freeloaders in their pursuit of loyal site returners.

It's arrived: the feminisation of the net:

"It's arrived: the feminisation of the net Graphic: web use Katie Allen, media business correspondent Thursday August 23, 2007 The Guardian Forget the 20-something man playing online fantasy football and selling motorbike parts on eBay.

The internet has a new user. For years cyberspace has been tailored to an audience of mainly young men but for the first time women webusers have taken the lead in key age groups. At the same time an army of silver surfers has emerged and the over 65s are spending more hours online than any other age group.

The latest snapshot of Britain's communications market by regulator Ofcom turns the established assumptions about web users upside down. It also shows all of us spending more time online and on our mobiles than ever before. Watching television, surfing the web, making phone calls and listening to the radio now take up an average 50 hours a week.

While TV watching, radio listening and home phone use have all fallen since 2002, our daily minutes on the web have doubled. The UK has the most active internet population in Europe thanks to widely available broadband connections that are getting cheaper every year."

Information commissioner orders disclosure of NPfIT documents

Stefan Brands lays into OpenID

Philip Greenspun: "All of Tanzania, 35 million people, currently share about 30 Mbits of Internet connectivity, the same amount of bandwidth that Verizon offers to American families in their homes via their FiOS service"

Jon Udell is discussing hosted lifebits scenarios and includes a health care scenario. There is an interesting parallel between the portability of social networking and the portability of personal medical records.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

tafiti is neat. Tafiti is a new search engine from Microsoft. It has some nice UI features, which require the Silverlight plug-in

Ajaxian: Zoho Writer Goes Offline with Gears

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Google Earth - books layer

some weaknesses in Google Scholar

Lorcan Dempsey: "There is a growing gap between the positions that the library profession takes with respect to the literature more generally and the state of its own literature"

iMedix - very Health 2.0 ish

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Guardian Unlimited as a Netvibes universe

Doctor Google and Doctor Microsoft

Cynthia Rettig: The trouble with Enterprise Software

Quote: According to a multiyear study of over 400 companies by MIT researchers Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill and David Robertson,3 IT departments tend not to be innovative leaders within organizations, but rather conservative forces, viewed by business executives as cost sinks and liabilities. In many companies, it takes the IT department one to two years to implement a new strategic initiative — hardly the agility companies are striving for. The research shows the typical IT structure is so dense and extensive that it’s often a miracle that it works at all. The researchers observe: “Legacy systems cobbled together to respond to each new business initiative create rigidity and excessive costs. Every change becomes a risky, expensive venture.”