Congratulations! AltSearchEngines Post #2001

November 26th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

RWW Live podcast on the Health 2.0 movement

November 26th, 2008 by Hope Leman
Posted in Health, Reviews | No Comments »

I don’t usually comment on podcasts as not everyone has the easiest time accessing sound files. But here is a discussion all those interested in the burgeoning Health 2.0 movement will find worth listening to: RWW Live: Health 2.0

This is the link: http://odeo.com/episodes/23665959-RWW-Live-Health-2-0

I recommend that medical librarians, those in the search industry, in the fields of clinical research, patient advocacy, consumer and public heath, health care administration and budding techno savvy entrepreneurs listen to this discussion because it renders clear the many flavors of Health 2.0 from online patient communities to health information management tools for physicians to the innovative efforts of Private Access to solve the problem of how to enable patients to provide the data that scientists need to do their jobs in such a way that privacy and confidentiality are protected. And Abe Lederman of DeepWeb Technologies made the point dear the hearts of readers of this blog that all of this content has to be aggregated and rendered searchable. And there is a huge amount of content, given the rise of such consumer health sites as OrganizedWisdom. CEO Steven Krein was one of the panelists.

It was fascinating to listen to the discussants talk about their various products and services and to keep wondering the whole time how the floods of highly sensitive data can be both protected and searched. Robert Shelton of Private Access made several cogent comments on that issue. He also cited the physician member site Sermo as a prime example of how social networking in medicine is producing substantive content.

This brings up the matter of who gets to see what. Sermo is a members-only community. It does not necessarily want its content rendered all too findable to the prying eyes of the public.

Apropos of this kind of concern, at the Health 2.0 conference in October 2008 in San Francisco there was a intriguing presentation by a member of the firm Social Kinetics, which seems to be operating in stealth mode. Not much info on its site.

It will be fascinating to follow how firms such as Social Kinetics and DeepWeb Technologies deploy highly sophisticated and differing technologies and in what venues. I have spoken to Abe Lederman and if there is a more brilliant mind at work on such issues, you will have to make a pretty convincing case to that effect. He is the closest thing to a genius I have ever met.

Search for Vocal Talent with Voices.com

November 26th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News, Verticals | No Comments »

Voices.com is an online marketplace connecting clients with voice-over talents and voice actors. Radio and television stations, advertising agencies and corporate communications executives rely upon the Voices marketplace to search for, audition and hire professional voice-over talents by searching the database or by posting a job using a unique web service. Voice talents looking for work register for free as a Guest or subscribe as a Preferred or Premium member and are equipped with a comprehensive set of self-managed tools to effectively market themselves and conduct business online.

“Doctor, I read it on Google”

November 26th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors | 3 Comments »

As I observed earlier when writing about Emerging Trends in Healthcare, the relative knowledge levels are changing rapidly in the physician-patient relationship. In the past, the physician was clearly the expert and the patient simply accepted the doctor’s judgment and counsel without question.

Today’s web-savvy Health care consumers, however, are adept at finding comprehensive and detailed information about their own condition and disease. In many ways, in fact, they have an advantage over the doctor – a patient only has to learn about one particular condition (or a few); whereas a physician, even a specialist, must necessarily cover a far wider range of medical knowledge.

By and large, most doctors are uncomfortable with this sudden shift in patient knowledge level and the potential for second-guessing the doctor’s opinion, that goes with it. New research from Microsoft suggests that the doctors may be right!

Microsoft Research has just published an article on this topic: Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search. The study authors found that patients who perform Web Searches about their symptoms, tend to have an exaggerated sense of their illness. Says the article:

However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure.
…
We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users,

Overall, though, this finding is hardly surprising. As any layperson who has ever perused a medical encyclopedia knows, just reading about the specific symptoms for any random disease makes one start to start imagine those very same symptoms – it is part of the human condition! Obviously the same thing happens when patients read medical information online.

At the same time, there is a distinct upside for patient health in having all of this medical information easily available and accessible to all. Informed patients are in a better position to understand what is happening to them; they can handle it better and can take better care of themselves in addressing their own health problems.

In any case, this is a one-way street. The genie is out of the bottle now and patients will be increasingly better-informed in the future. Whether this is preferable or not, physicians had better gear up to deal with this change.

Source: The Software Abstractions blog

What Is LittleShoot?

November 26th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Innovations | No Comments »

LittleShoot is a tool for:

1. Publishing (transmitting)
2. Searching (finding new signals)
3. Downloading (receiving)

Let’s start with searching. When you search with LittleShoot, you can find all the media files everyone else on the network is sharing, all right within your browser. Here’s what search results look like:

If you want to become a participant in the network, to disseminate your knowledge, you have to publish. Just click the “Browse…” button and select your file, and it’s published to the world. You don’t need to upload it or anything, your file is immediately available in search results because it’s already on your computer. With LittleShoot, that’s all we need. Finally, when you actually go to download, you simply click on links in the download window. Behind the scenes, LittleShoot downloads the file using our peer-to-peer platform.

Global Search

LittleShoot uses centralized search to quickly search all the files available on the network. This is in contrast to other “peer-to-peer” systems where searching is distributed across the network. The result is far more results for you, and you get them faster. You can search by file name or by tags.

LittleShoot is Fast

We already mentioned one reason our search is fast, but it’s also fast because the LittleShoot plugin caches results. This means when you click through your searches, your browser is usually accessing results information already on your computer instead of going through the Internet again. The Internet is slow compared to your computer. You’ll notice it when you click through the pages of your search results. They’ll appear almost instantly.

YouTube and Flickr Search: LittleShoot also searches other sources like YouTube and Flickr.

Source: LittleShoot