Tales of Hoffman

BoggerCon II -- Another Medical Session?

Dave announced BloggerCon II this week and in this post, mentions the possibility of bringing back the Medical session:

And if there's sufficient interest, we will repeat the sessions on medicine and law, and possibly add sessions for art, education, science and literature. Let me know.

So what's the interest level out there to attend on the part of medical bloggers? It's not that bad a trip for me from New York, so I may go anyway, but I'm curious to see if we can organize another Med Blog meetup. Last year, I really enjoyed spending some time (although not enough due to the quick in and out of my trip to Boston) with Enoch, Jacob, Bob, and Lisa. Any takers? I'd be happy to help organize a lunch or dinner. It would be great to finally meet some others (Alwin?, Chris?, Sydney?).

Wireless-Doc Does Medscape

Met with Bill Kolosky of Wireless-Doc fame last Friday. A really sharp guy who is trying to figure out where the sweet spot is for blogging, RSS, wireless, and knowledge management in a hospital setting. Due to first person experience, he's got a particular focus on (and soft spot for) the residents of the world, who work some of the longest hours and have some of the biggest needs for information at the point of care.

I'm encouraged to see docs devoting serious time to this problem, and as I told Bill, firmly believe that Medscape has a role to play here. Obviously, as with most ideas in this space, there will be a little more time before the technology catches up with the big ideas. But that will happen, and Medscape will be in the middle of it, for sure. Here's Bill's take on our meetup.

iLife? PoLife.

Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life? has been added to the "Current and Recent Reads" at the left. I was a little apprehensive that it would wind up being a preachy Oprah-thon, but it really isn't. Just great stories of real people who either found the "thing" they wanted to do with their life or didn't. And how they got there. It's great to read these real stories. Well written and thought provoking.

Whither Yahoo?

So today at Fury.com there was quite a bit of back and forth about the design of Yahoo's new search. I won't get myself in the middle of whether or not Yahoo's new search is good, bad or just a copy of Google, but I will say this. I've been using My Yahoo for more than 5 years (is that possible?) and the interface there has not changed a wit.

In that period of time, I don't think I've visited Yahoo's homepage at www.yahoo.com more than once or twice. In trying to access the right pages to figure out if I agree or disagree with all the discussion, I finally visited said homepage and let me say one thing...."What the....?" What a mess! Is it me? (click the image at right for full size) Has Yahoo lost it completely. This is the biggest mishmash of sponsorship, ads, content, functionality, and overall whatnot that I think I've ever seen. Yahoo was Google before Google was. Simplicity was beauty. Now, forget it. Somebody at Yahoo, do yourself a favor and look at your homepage. Cut 80% and maybe...maybe your users will forgive you.

News Flash!!!

Via Medpundit, Via Chance to Cut...National Enquirer with this breaking news story. In a startling discovery, researchers have firmly established that Doctors are People, Too.

Welcome Back!

Just coming back from a long weekend here...actually, when you look at how long it's been since I last posted, I guess my weekend was a little longer than most. ;-)

Anyway, here's another of my intermittent plugs for Medscape's Live online CME events. Reducing Thrombotic Risk in Cancer Patients is an hour-long web-based presentation, with time for questions and answers from the audience that you can see on Medscape, live, at 7pm EST tomorrow night. These events are getting more and more popular and I'd be interested in feedback from this particular "peanut gallery" as to how we can make them even better.

Medscape RSS = Mobile Medical News

This is so cool! According to this post, Dr. Koslosky is going to include mention of using Medscape's RSS feeds in a mobile setting during his presentation tomorrow (mentioned below...). I won't be able to view the presentation "live" but you can bet I'll be loading it up as soon as I can tomorrow night. Don't miss it.

Included in my presentation is mention of the use of RSS feeds for medical information. As you can see from this screenshot, I use the Medscape feed as portrayed by Hand/RSS as an example.

 

Online Seminar on Treo 600 in Medicine

Mark your calendars as Bill Kolosky from the Wireless-Doc blog gives a "webinar" (gosh I hate those goofy, trying-so-hard-to-be-cute combo words) next week on using the Treo 600 for medical applications. It should be an interesting show and I'm hoping he's still planning on talking about how he's using the Medscape RSS feeds to keep up to date on medical news while on the go.

Dr. Winters Doles out the Digital Justice

Richard Winters (welcome back, btw), gives a whole new (literal) meaning to "getting the license plate of the truck that hit you."

Swipe: A Budding "Infomediary"?

I've posted before about my time at McKinsey working with John Hagel. One of the big projects I worked on was the book Net Worth, which was about the potential for growth of a whole new class of businesses called "infomediaries" centered on helping you manage your personal information and broker access to it by third party organizations.

Via boingboing, I see a new site called Swipe. This is the first time I've really seen anyone actually take some of the ideas in the book and put them to use. Oh, a few people tried to put together business plans around this (you know who you are!), but they were always pie in the sky, BIG business, a la 1999-2000. In the new reality of the 21st century (in other words, no VC money), this may be the only way for an actual infomediary to start up and grow. I'm not sure if this is what Swipe is planning, or if it's just a cheeky tweak of the whole personal information gathering business. Right now, their featuring a way to "see" what info is embedded in your driver's license barcode, a way to easily request the personal info that some of the big database companies have on you, and a flash-based calculator that enables you to see the actual worth of your personal information to a large company (most "Net Worth-ian", I must say). In any event, it's worth a look.