January 2010
28 posts
The Indispensable Man of Open Science: A Talk with...
Before we begin, Cameron, I’d like to give readers a bit of background as to how I heard of you and why I think it is so important for people interested in topics such as Medicine 2.0, Health 2.0, Science 2.0 and important societal trends and Web issues in general to know who you are and what Open Science and Open Notebook Science are. I work in the healthcare industry and one of my tasks is...
Twitter – A Villanelle
Twitter – A Villanelle Be my friend in real life, more so than on Twitter. A palm on hand binds us together like no single passing tweet. Follow me down to the setting sun – we’ll revel in its glitter. Though the Web may be the Great Transmitter, we’re born to join hand-in-hand, face-to-face, seat-to-seat. Be my friend in real life, more so than on Twitter. The Web of Life is rare...
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Do Normal People Follow Big Pharma On Twitter?
Do “normal” people – patients, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, life scientists, etc – follow Big Pharma on Twitter? I’ve long had a hunch that most of the followers (and by followers I mean people who are actually paying attention) of Pharma accounts are primarily consultants, marketers, PR pros, social media evangelists and others interested in Pharma’s use of the Web (including myself). So...
Some Never Awaken
via i174.photobucket.com Posted via web from Phil Baumann’s Posterous | Comment »
Corporate Personhood - The Work of a Court...
via i.imgur.com Posted via web from Phil Baumann’s Posterous | Comment »
Stanford's Sapolsky On Depression in U.S. (Full...
via youtube.com By far one of the most comprehensive views on Clinical Depression I’ve seen. Posted via web from Phil Baumann’s Posterous | Comment »
"Violence On Television" a poem by Louis Jenkins
It is best to turn on the set only after all the stations have gone off the air and just watch the snowfall. This is the other life you have been promising yourself; somewhere back in the woods, ten miles from the nearest town, and that just a wide place in the road with a tavern and a gas station. When you drive home, after midnight, half drunk, the roads are treacherous. And your wife is...
So you can start a conversation with this tweet,...
Here is the additional text that can be added. This is like a regular blog post. A great way to dovetail traditional blogging with Twitter. Posted via web from Phil Baumann’s Posterous | Comment »
Testing Post.ly -...
Posterous turns its url-shortener Post.ly into a client for Twitter. Whether you’re logged into Posterous or sign via Open Auth, you can post tweets and add multiple files, media, etc. using the service. The service provides an option for additional text (what you’re reading is the “additional” text for this post). I’m wondering if this may be a new way to extend...
Twitter's Fail Whale Logo Replacement
via editorial.sidereel.com Posted via web from Phil Baumann’s Posterous | Comment »
Will The New York Times meter kill traffic from...
The New York Times just announced that it will begin charging frequent visitors a flat fee for full access to the site in early 2011. Non-paying visitors will be allowed to view a certain number of articles per month. The New York Times is the leading print newspaper website according to Experian Hitwise, and accounted for nearly 15% of visits to all newspaper sites for the week ending January...
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The Inequality of DTC Regulation
By government regulation prescription drug advertising is under much greater scrutiny than other health advertising. While that is the way it is, one has to question the logic. A consumer, who is barraged by all types of health product ads, is somehow less protected from claims made by OTC’s, supplements, weight loss products, exercise equipment, and physicians and hospitals. A hospital can...
If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online -...
The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Ruby Washington/The New York Times “At night, I can text or watch something on YouTube until I fall...
Martin Luther Kind on Technology
MLK on Technology - http://bit.ly/5yvHEC Posted via email from TechneScan | Comment »
How to Make Twitter More Sociable - Make Tweets...
Some ideas on how to enrich Twitter’s conversational and social platform without sacrificing its basic service: make individual tweets on status URL’s like FriendFeed. Here’s what I wrote up on Friendfeed. Twitter and FriendFeed always had a sibling type relationship, from my perspective at least. If team Twitter has the engineering fortitude to steal FriendFeed’s...
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Why Talking to Yourself Might be The Highest Form...
Have you ever found yourself asking someone a question you’ve been puzzling over for a long time, only to come up with the answer half way through asking the question? At Madgex, the developers refer back to an old beer advert for John Smiths when trying to solve problems. They find that when they need help, just calling someone over and explaining the problem to them often gives them the...
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louisgray.com: Synaptic Web: Realtime is Just the...
I like the Synaptic Web because it’s different. Unlike other projects or initiatives I’ve been involved with, the Synaptic Web is not an open standard, advocacy group or business. It is not even something Khris, Eric or I invented. It is not even something we are advocating for or developing. It is simply something we observed and wrote down. We wrote it down because we needed a...
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Foursquare Is Powerful Enough to Cure Insomnia and...
So I’ve been toying AROUND with Sillicon Valley’s latest toy Foursquare. I realize geolocation services are going to become very big this year as mobile and social become more common. But sometimes I wonder how carried away evangelists can get sometimes. Anyhoo, I haven’t seriously used Foursquare but have been intruiged by its usage - it seems a lof of people on Twitter love...
apophenia: Facebook's move ain't about changes in...
When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that ‘the age of privacy is over’ (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this: People I knew didn’t used to like to be public. Now “everyone” is being public. Ergo, privacy is dead. This isn’t new. This is the exact same logic that...
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Why freemium is bad for business | Software as...
I’ve never been comfortable with free products for business use, even though it’s difficult to avoid using them if you’re a small or one-person business (web analytics, for example, has been all but wiped out as a low-end paid service by Google’s free offering). As a long-term observer of the scene, my worry is that the track record over the past decade isn’t encouraging; many more free services...
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Only The Paranoid Are Scared Of TV Everywhere
Some people don’t like TV Everywhere, Comcast’s and Time Warner’s plan to bring cable TV to the Web. They are just paranoid. Allow me to explain. In his 1964 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter argued that American politics has often been a stage for excessively conspiratorial and suspicious minds from both the...
Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?
Looking for old tweets? You won’t find any that are more than a week or so old on Twitter. Put the blame on all the massive number of new tweets coming in. The engines, they canna hold captain! Or that is, the search index behind Twitter Search can’t hold it all. To see this in action, consider a search for “happy new year,” date restricted to New Year’s Day 2010. You’d expect a huge number of...
Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections...
Corporations are pitching a bizarre product — a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads...
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Google threat a rare show of defiance in China,...
Google threat a rare show of defiance in China BEIJING — Google’s threat to pull out of China over censorship is a rare display of defiance in a system where foreign companies have long accepted intrusive controls to gain access to a huge and growing market. Dismayed by the prospect of a China without Google, visitors left flowers at its Beijing headquarters Wednesday as Web sites buzzed...
Social filtering of scientific information – a...
“It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.“ (Clay Shirky) Bonetta (2009) gave an excellent introduction to the micro-blogging service Twitter and its uses and limitations for scientific communication. We believe that other social networking tools merit a similar introduction, especially those that provide more effective filtering of scientifically relevant information than Twitter. We...
Phil Baumann
A little over a week ago I decided to take a break from Twitter and to heavily reduce my use of the Web in general. It’s becoming apparent to me that those of us who work heavily with the Web need to pay attention to how this Seventh Kingdom of Life influences how we work and play and connect. Here’s what I did and the insights I gained from a week away from Twitter. Overall the experience was...
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Google’s Approach to Social for 2010 – GigaOM
Though Google’s social strategy has been catch-up at best to date, the company does have a master plan — at least according to engineering director David Glazer, whom I spoke with last week at Google HQ. He said across a variety of products, Google wants to make it valuable and easy to harness social information. In 2010, Google plans to expose and elicit more of the social network built into...
The Psychology of Twitter | World of Psychology
The Pros and Cons of Twitter Because of this, Twitter has some unique pros and cons. On the pros side, Twitter is yet another way to communicate online. I’m not certain anyone thought we needed this (”Oh great, one more thing I need to keep updated!”), but its popularity speaks to an unfilled communications void. The fact that it allows you to also update your status on other social networks...