As politicians, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies and doctors debate what the quality and cost of your healthcare will be in the years to come, it’s important to understand the role personalized medicine will play in the debate.
Continue reading "What will Healthcare Look Like in Five Years? " »
The loss of Michael Jackson has touched so many across the globe. It’s been the hot topic of conversation for people of all ages, and those conversations have exploded in the social media world. More and more frequently, today’s news is being discussed in social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook as it happens.
On Thursday, Mashable noted that according to the Twitter tracking tool Twist, at least 30% of Tweets were about the star’s tragic passing, which was probably an underestimate. Even fellow celebrities used Twitter to express their feelings over MJ’s passing. Immediately following the news, TweetVolume noted that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates. And according to TechCrunch nine out of ten of the trending topics on Twitter that day were MJ-related. Twitter even had to remove features like Search on its main site to stay afloat. Not surprising, Twitter suffered under the traffic and the familiar fail whale made its appearance.
Other social media sites hosted their share of the news as well. Less than an hour after Jackson's death had been confirmed, more than 500 groups remembering Michael Jackson appeared on Facebook, some with more than 50,000 members. YouTube spotlighted his most memorable videos and linked to MJ’s channel, which had more than 9 million views as of Friday.
While social media outlets may be hosting conversations about big news stories, the sites are still not credited as valid sources in line with traditional trusted media outlets. As we saw with MJ’s passing, the LA Times was most frequently noted as the source, although TMZ.com had reported the story hours earlier. Although mainstream America was hesitant to believe the blog, breaking the MJ news is still being viewed as a turning point for TMZ’s questionable credibility, in addition to bringing the blog a much higher level of recognition.
Chris O'Brien, one of my fave business columnists at the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a piece earlier this month about the gender gap between the way teens view careers in tech. I was surprised (as was Chris) that the gap is (still) as big as it is. In a world increasingly geared toward how much we can access on our smartphones, developing, promoting and using technology—in all of its forms—is going to be key to our world’s future success. We need to do everything we can to help girls think about computer science and technology with adjectives such as “cool” and “fun” rather than “boring” and “geeky”.
Short of a female version of David Pogue capturing our hearts, how can we help close this gap? Spread a positive industry voice when speaking to daughters, sisters and nieces; volunteer at any of the many organizations out there; and of course, buy pink tech gadgets! Here’s a sampling of cameras, cell phones and laptops to get you started.
A quick shout out to Jon Snyder of Wired.com. That’s his photo above; I pulled from a Gadget Lab posting by Priya Ganapati about an upcoming kids netbook from Disney.
As the last Twitter holdout at Sterling Communications, I have finally been assimilated. I now understand how easily one can be sucked into the Twitter vortex, resurfacing after losing hours of productive time.
In an article by Patrick May, the San Jose Mercury News cited research from Compete.com that in May there were nearly 20 million unique visitors to the site, up from 2 million in May 2008. I wonder, will the huge burst in popularity of Twitter cause its original adherents to disdain the service and move on to the New New Thing? There are parallels to be drawn with the fad of Citizens Band two-way radio in the mid-to-late 1970’s.
As I child, I had a front-row seat to the CB phenomenon as my parents were among the first of the non-trucking community to cotton to it. My father was in charge of IT for the Oregon State Police Department, and oversaw the purchase of CB radios for patrol cars to use for monitoring traffic. He became enamored of it and bought a base station for our house, to sit alongside his police scanner, as well as mobile units for our cars. He insisted family members adopt “handles” and learn the 10-codes and slang (my first foreign language).
As Tiffany Anderson noted in her recent post, protestors of the political situation in Iran are increasingly using social media to spread awareness.
It’s interesting to note that traditionally professional journalists are using the same social mediums in their reporting. While some may debate the journalistic merit of Twitter feeds, with this topic in particular, audiences depend on social media for the most recent turn of events. One particularly popular source is Andrew Sullivan’s blog at the Atlantic, which aggregates news snippets with little additional written editorial. It’s a far cry from the lengthy descriptive articles found on NYT or WSJ, but several people have referred me there for the most up-to-date information. As far as journalistic merit, the pieces that are posted are often factually unvetted (by Andrew's own admission), are distributed with one or two lines of commentary, and are said to be skewed toward the blogger's political perspective.
So, concerned citizens of the world: Is this "reposting of tweets" enough to qualify as “real journalism" or something else? And does it matter, as long as the world is informed?
Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (UGBC), LEED is an internationally recognized certification system that encourages sustainable green building and development practices by measuring areas such as energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emission reduction, etc. To many, this certification rating system has worked thus far for most building developments, but a recent article in Earth2Tech raises questions about whether or not the current rating system is also applicable for many of today’s data centers.
Social media is no longer just for networking, interaction and status updates; it can be used as a vehicle to demonstrate your support for political movements. This week, people have been using their social media avatars to peacefully show their support for those fighting for democracy in Iran.
The trend of shading avatars green has become infectious and inspired hundreds of people to get educated on what’s going. The new color creates curiosity and invites people to ask why. I noticed the growing trend today, finally pushing me to ask what was going on:
It’s pretty darn interesting (blimey!) that a political party inspired by music and video file-sharing (or stealing, depending on your point of view) could garner 7.1% of the vote in a free, fair election to a major governmental body. I wonder how many people who voted for Sweden’s Pirate Party earlier this week were secretly hoping Johnny Depp would attend a rally? I’m sure people thought it’d be a real hoot to have a Pirate in the European Parliament, to accompany all the unofficial pirates, but it does seem to undercut the seriousness of any election. Well, considering the number of faux cowboys that have been elected to the White House (I changed “elected” from active to passive since I certainly wasn’t involved), I won't sit in judgment. And I do admire the group for managing to broaden its message beyond its original single issue to a wider platform of civil liberties, rather the way the Green Party has done in so many countries. Sweden, and other complacent political parties, could use a little shake-up. Aaaaarrrrrhhhh!
P.S. That isn’t their real logo, BTW.
In a recent post, TechCrunch asks: where will you be at 9:01 pm PT this Friday? If you're a social media junkie, chances are you'll be on Facebook, registering your vanity URL. That's right; you'll now be able to access pages by typing in http://www.facebook.com/yournamehere.
Image care of the Facebook Blog
It's about time, Facebook! Even LinkedIn and MySpace were ahead of you on this one. Of course, to give everyone a fair chance at a unique username while playing social media catchup, Facebook has decided to open the floodgates wide at one specific time for everyone, meaning that everyone will be logging in and crashing the system on Friday night (that's when IT likes to work, right?). It should be an interesting battle over usernames, especially for smaller startups that need to stake a claim for their brands.
