Ten nuggets about the blogoshere

Over five days last week Technorati published their State of the Blogosphere report. Ten interesting and amusing nuggets that caught my attention (in no particular order) were:

1. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, and one-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates

2. The majority of bloggers have advertising on their blogs. Those that do have a mean annual revenue of $6,000 (however, this is skewed by the top 1% of bloggers who earn $200k+)

3. Half of bloggers consider their style to be sincere, conversational, humorous, and expert in nature (ha!)

4. Seven percent of bloggers have angered their friends or family by blogging about personal things, though ten percent of bloggers keep their blog secret from those close to them

5. Half of corporate and professional bloggers have become better known in their industry, and one in four have used their blog as a resume enhancement

6. Over half of the Technorati top authority bloggers post five or more times per day (gulp), and half of all active blogs attract more than 1000 monthly visitors (double gulp)

7. “News” was the #1 most-used tag by bloggers (whoever said folksonomy wouldn’t work?)

8. Half of bloggers believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years, and one in five bloggers don’t think that newspapers will survive the next ten years

9. Fewer than one in five bloggers consider themselves snarky or confessional

10. While the majority of bloggers manage their blogs solo, among professional and corporate bloggers, one in ten pay staff to contribute to their blogs

Finally, according to Technorati, (the) health informaticist is ranked: 863,799th (hmm, could do better), and has an authority rating of 7 (make of that what you will).

PubReMiner; a nice PubMed ‘added-value’ tool

PubReMiner is a nice little tool that will help you find MeSH and other terms quickly for a bunch of references in PubMed without clicking Display:MEDLINE all the time. So let’s say I’m about to do a search on dyspepsia and am looking to get some pointers on what synonymous terms I can use. Well, I can go to PubReMiner and put in, say “dyspepsia[ti] AND review[pt]“, and PubReMinder will go off and search PubMed and quickly and clearly come back with a breakdown of the resulting hits showing you the frequency of MeSH terms, the text terms, the most common authors, journals, countries and substances. The ‘authors’ list might be useful for finding commentators, experts etc., the ‘journals’ may tell you where you want to try and publish in the field or maybe which journals are useful to consider “table of content” searching, while of course text and MeSH terms will help you in planning any searches you might be considering. So, to come back to our search for dyspepsia, PubReMiner quickly points me in the direction of keywords such as “Helicobacter, gastroesophageal reflux, endoscopy, anti-ulcer agents, gastritis, peptic ulcer” etc. It’s nice. I like it. The best thing to do is just to try it out, though should you like to know more Laika has written a clear and longer review.

UKeiG Intranet Forum, 25 September 2008

Today I attended a unique forum that allowed one to see different intranets and listen to the strategies behind them.  The UKeiG forums have been going on for a little while, and as I have been trying to attend one for almost a year, I can attest that they are very popular. There was a range of experience (me at the lower end…) and areas (academic, research, charity, entrepreneurial) on display.

Imperial College’s new portal for students is fully customisable and aims to make finding information online much more convenient for students.  The ‘preset’ version has a TFL Service Updates widget (showing which tube lines are on time or delayed) and tabs with links to the Library and Student Resources.  Students are encouraged to collaborate with a link to Facebook front and centre.  David and his team have done an admirable job of being thorough and involving the students with this.

Janet Corcoran showed us a nicely organised intranet for the 150 library staff at Imperial College (scattered across 3 campuses and a few hospitals).  Their goal was to get their documentation, meeting minutes and important information shareable and onto a wiki that can be edited by all, rather than static and difficult to find on folders (why can’t we do that).

Cancer Research UK needs to support 40,000 staff in various locations and so has an appropriately large intranet–full of all the forms, policy & procedures documents, and handy details that one could ever need.  The fact that they have devolved control for uploading and editing content to 100 staff members allows the intranet to stay current and interesting.  Previously, their single content manager proved to be a bit of a bottleneck in their system.  The future will see more developments that will make this portal even more powerful.

And finally Oneis presented a very shiny and new hosted information management system.  Their target audience is smaller organisations (5 to 50 employees) such as consultants or researchers.  Their system looks user-friendly and flexible, allowing very finely-defined levels of access to different people.  Also, one search brings up documents, people, images or presentations.  Definitely one to watch.

Because portals are usually hidden behind a password or IP authentication, it’s a worthwhile activity to ‘air’ them once in a while (I wish mine were forum-worthy).  Thank you to Janet Corcoran and Karen Blakeman for organising an interesting afternoon.

Google phones – misnomer

So Google are releasing their Google phone, snappily called “G1″. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are also up to new phone tricks, so the next few days should be interested for those of us into gadgets. Of course it’s all being portrayed as ooh, watch out Apple, but it all seems to be a case of comparing, well, apples and oranges (or rather operating systems). The iPhone is a lovely piece of kit from Apple, as we all know. They designed the operating system and the hardware, and they did the marketing and just about everything else. They made it look beautiful and they got people talking and, quite rightly, they changed the way (slightly, but definitely) we all think of mobile phones. Blackberry are another company who, while their business plan is different to Apple, control the whole process from software to hardware to marketing to after-sales service, and they create a full end-user product, targetted carefully, that changes the market; in fact, it created a whole new market for itself.

And then there is Google phone. And this is where I’m wondering what Google is up to. They’re very bright, and I’m sure they’re up to something, but the thing with the Google phone is that Google are not creating a finished phone product. No, they’ve just created a new operating system – like Symbian – and yet people are still talking about the phone (i.e. the physical thing in one’s hands) as the Google phone. But the phone is not made by Google; rather, it’s made by htc, who have been making ’smartphones’ for a while now (with those funny little fold-out keypads). The phone seems to look, well, clunky – it’s “going to be the ugly duckling to the iPhone’s swan”. It’s just an operating system. It’s not a phone. People don’t talk about operating systems (at least not on phones), people don’t get excited by operating systems, but because it’s Google some folks might think “oooh Google phone… let’s have a look…. is that it? Ugly.”

I suppose that like Chrome, Google might not be thinking that their product is going to become the leading brand, but rather that they can nudge others towards changing the nuts and bolts of their operating systems to end up supporting more of Google’s advertising and/or cloud computing models. But right now I look at the Google phone and I wonder if they didn’t miss an opportunity here? Should they not have gone for the full vertical model and not only create a new operating system but also the design of a new phone, with the associated marketing etc. It’s not as if they’re short of money. At the moment it looks like a half hearted move into the phone market that will be all but forgotten a fortnight on Thursday…

Case studies again, though this time 300 yr old case studies…

Anne Welsh was inspired by some of my incoherent babblings on case studies and has done some snuffling around and come up with an interesting article “on the use of patient case studies in surgical treatises in the late 17th century”, which explains how the use of case studies for education and description of best (and worst!) practice was in use in the late 1600s in England. It makes interesting reading – do take a look if you have a moment.

If you’re interested in the history of EBM, I’d like to remind you that you could do a lot worse than to take a look at the James Lind Library, where you can find details of, amongst other things, a 10th Century AD controlled trial… (no record of whether he got ethics approval first.)

Info profs should take responsibility for clouds

Nice post, Alan. I’ve had a look at the Symtym blog post on personal clouds and have had to click on most of his links to understand what many of the programs do.

There is a vast need for time management/ ‘GTD’ (=Getting things done) solutions and a wide array of programs and tools available. It was a 2002 book by David Allen that helped enmesh time management principles with the sort of software that could echo and enable these principles in practice. A link from this article led me to an elegant table comparing GTD software. The table allows you to sort by release date (MonkeyGTD was released only yesterday), alphabetically by name, by platform/web/handheld or by free/paid. Another slightly less faceless option to getting things done is Sandy, a free electronic personal assistant.  You email or text her to tell her what and when, and she reminds you by email or text message.

Me and most of the folks I work with rely on Outlook tasks and calendar to remind us of what is going on. This is a bit backward and personally, I’d like to improve what I do, especially with regards to task lists.  I think I’ll keep an eye out for blogs like Heidigoseek, an LIS student who is figuring out the best (& most cost-effective) way to sync her information.  She writes about synching her iPhone without DigitalMe, a paid program, here.

Several years ago, I had a Blackberry for work and that is the most synched up I have ever been. It was a pain when I occasionally left it turned on over the weekend, only to be confronted with work emails at odd hours.  At the time it was also poor for web surfing.  But I still found it useful.

The real point of these gadgets, I believe is not to make us hyper-efficient, but perhaps to allay our anxieties that we might not have all the information we could ever need, with us, at all times. I agree with you that I too do not want the weight of the world on my shoulders when I go for a nice long walk and still want to bring my mobile phone. There needs to be some sort of filtering mechanism…

I think that for many early adopters, what having the latest smartphone does to enhance their personal image is almost more important to them than practicalities like “will it sync with BOTH my Google Calendar AND my Outlook?” The tide is turning, and with things like the GTD movement, it is no longer how to revolve your life around your gadgets, but what can they do for you.

Alan, I think those are good questions to ask. Regarding Q3, I think you should have a chat with the powers that be and see if they would be up for a technology evangelist in your organisation. Perhaps it *should* be the informaticist’s role to be this guide, this champion of technology, but it can be a minefield if, like me, you have a preexisting IT department who controls what is installed onto computers. I suppose you can influence people’s practice at home and that can trickle down to more people making requests of IT.

One more thing–an exciting (yes, my heart did a flutter) post on going paperless.

An example of cloud computing: Tim

I’m impressed by Tim’s personal cloud. What’s his personal cloud? Well, it’s everything that he needs, e.g. mail, calender, to-do list, contact details etc, which he’s set up to follow him around everywhere. He has them accessible at his desktop and notebook computers, iPhone and various other internet–connected devices. He can enter new content, e.g. someone’s email address, at any point in the cloud (e.g. his desktop) and as if by magic it’s pushed around and synched up with the rest of his personal devices, e.g. to his iPhone.

To get Tim’s cloud working takes a long list of applications, including: Mac Leopard applications (Address Book, iCal and Mail); MobileMe; iPhone applications (Calendar, Contacts and Mail), Google Calendar, Gmail, BusySync, Google Docs, Google Sites (wiki), Google Notebook, Google Reader and Mac Evernote. His post explains it all. Despite the work, or perhaps because of it, It’s great stuff.

It got me thinking.

1) my personal cloud is pretty pathetic. I have MS Outlook at work, which I do not (and I admit, at the moment, cannot) access outside of the office; I have a not unpleasant little Nokia mobile which is certainly though not an iPhone or smart or anything but a phone with a list of contacts on it, which I occasionally synch with my laptop when I get around to it; and I have a very beautiful and very old-school Moleskine diary/notebook, which resolutely refuses to be synched to anything…

2) do I actually want to be synched up any more? I mean, if an email comes in to my work address over the weekend which might end up ruining my Monday, do I really want to know about it over the weekend? Either I do something about it, ruining my weekend, or I worry about it, ruining my weekend. Is there not something to be said about not being in contact all the time with the office?

3) finally, should we as information professionals be setting a trailblazing example to our firms, organisations, libraries etc? Should I be building my own personal cloud so that a) I know what it’s all about, b) I can help others to get their personal clouds up and running and c) I set an example to others to follow and take advantage of new technologies? Perhaps I am failing my flock miserably? Or am I simply deluded?

W-K buying UptoDate for $400 million? Still rubbish.

So Wolters Kluwer are buying UptoDate for probably something around $400 odd million? Well, UptoDate does apparently make around $80 million a year, and has seen “double-digit organic revenue growth” over the last 4 years, according to WK Health – but it does seem rather a lot of money, and apparently there was a bit of bidding war. WK do claim to be interested in dominating the point-of-care market so it looks like a strategically valid purchase, credit crunch or no credit crunch. But what can WK Health bring to the party? Apparently, “The combination of UpToDate and Wolters Kluwer Health provides the market with a unique value proposition for advancing patient care while reducing medical costs,” said Dr. Denise Basow, Editor-In-Chief of UpToDate. “Jointly, we can deliver a full suite of solutions to physicians and patients” [link]. I can’t really see how a clinical, point-of-care tool, particularly a non-EB tool, can have an impact on reducing medical costs; the needs of commissioning and procurement is totally different from the needs of a clinician on the ward. Still, what gets me is that, however popular it is to its users, UptoDate is pretty rubbish, don’t you think? Nobody likes it, apart from those pesky doctors… and they only like it because they or their mate probably wrote it. It’s old school. It’s opinion-based medicine. Yet it remains staggeringly successful. *he says with a heavy sigh.*

The things you learn from the internet…

The things you learn from the internet. I never knew that Autism could be effectively treated with epsom salts, of all things! Forget evidence or randomised controlled trials–I just saw a great article on eHow about how to do this. Imagine a website that can help you choose the correct chakra crystals (also by Melanierose, the epsom salts author, stay at home mother and president of the PTA), get rid of cellulite, make chicken quesadillas, and everything in between.

Unless the epsom salts article was intended as a joke, I cannot fathom why it would be allowed to stay up. Someone I showed it to suggested that was because ‘it won’t do any harm’. Yes, except the harm implicit in misinforming people and spreading the word about quack treatments.

Housekeeping: Technorati bug

On the WordPress FAQ and forums,there seems to be a consensus about a “pinging” bug. For us, this means a delay of 18 days and counting for which Technorati has not registered any new posts on their site (we’ve signed up and everything). The WordPress Support page advises patience as Technorati is experiencing explosive blog growth right now and they are probably behind on their Pingomatic pings from WP. However, looking back through the forums suggests this ‘temporary problem’ has been going on since 2006.

I did try sending pings from the Pingomatic website, with no success, so maybe WP is right. (Aside: why hasn’t Pingomatic updated their blog in the last 2 years?)

If you are a WordPress blogger and have experienced a similar problem, perhaps we can commiserate. Or exchange encouraging comments/ smileys.