The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft have purchased Medstory, the medical search engine for healthcare consumers:

Microsoft’s drive into the health care market is just getting under way, but the company signaled on Monday that one important ingredient in its plan will be a specialized search engine tailored to deliver useful medical information to consumers.

Microsoft is buying Medstory Inc., a small start-up in Foster City, Calif. Its search software applies artificial intelligence techniques to medical and health information in medical journals, government documents and on the Internet.

The Medstory purchase, said Peter Neupert, vice president for health strategy at Microsoft, was a first step in a broader company strategy to assemble technologies that will “improve the consumer experience in health care.”

Source

Web 2.0 was coined as a cool name for a conference about the state of the internet back in 2004. Kind of a play on the fact that software is released in ‘versions’ (1.1, 1.4, 1.2.3.1.2, etc, etc) whereas the web is clearly evolving and branching in a way that defies this kind of classification.

Web 2.0 draws an arbitrary line that says the current state of the web is significantly different now from how it was a few years ago.

There’s been a lot of talk about what Web 2.0 really means and what it doesn’t (here’s the official line from Tim O’Reilly who coined the term).

Here’s an anthropological take on Web 2.0:

This online app could be use for students creating their own learning projects or for staff to create course notes and resources for their students.

Revolution Health is a new startup from Steve Case, former CEO of America Online and chairman of AOL Time Warner.

The website is an amalgamation of several startups purchased by Case and aims to offer an information portal about healthcare with medical tools and a database of doctors and clinics which users can rate.

Visiting the site, the main emphasis seems to be on the ability to rate your own physician. It also offers users blogs, forums and other ways of posting their opinions about health problems and health delivery.

The site has information from several insitutions including the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Harvard.

The site is only just launched so the effects of the social networking and user generated content has not kicked in yet. It will be interesting to see whether the site provides professional evidenced based advice on health issues or just ends up being a repository of anecdotal evidence generated from it’s users.

Geni is a new ‘Web 2.0′ start-up company with a mission to build a complete family tree for humanity.

One particularly neat aspect of the site is that you can immediately start entering your information from the moment you arrive at the site. No signing up, checking emails, logging in, etc. Just visit the url and start entering information.

It’s also viral. You add the email addresses of your family members and they can access your tree and start adding information. Eventually, the trees start to merge and a larger family tree is created.

Could this have implications for medicine? - could we help track hereditary diseases through this kind of system?

Geni have a nice overview of their service on their blog.

Reports are circulating that some users are finding that their emails have been deleted from their Gmail accounts. A Google spokeswoman has sent this message to GigaOm:

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have. We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

Techcrunch also seem to have been contacted by the same person.

This story highlights the danger of relying on third parties for storing important information. If you have important emails stored on Gmail, I’d recommend forwarding them to your desktop email client or have some way of backing them up locally.

Robin Good posts a list of trends that he believes will become prominent in 2007.

Includes, video, online advertising and video-conferencing.

Via Jane Knight’s Blog.

At the moment I’m looking into synchronous tools for e-learning applications. This means video-conferences, VOIP, etc.

Here’s a pretty neat application. Paste in a VOIP phone to your blog!

Try it out on the sidebar —>

Update - I’m removing the Wengo Vision plug in as it is causing significant delays to the page loading.

Review me is a new website that allows bloggers to substitute the odd blog post for a paid review or advertisement. This is one such advertisement! They don’t have any strict rules about what the advert should say so I think it’s a nice way of including ads in your blog without sounding too commercial.

Advertisers will probably want reviewers to write positively about their product but as long as it’s clear that the post is an advert I don’t think there’s too much wrong with that. There isn’t actually a requirement that the reviews be positive and ‘constructive criticism’ is suggested but I would have thought savvy bloggers will sway the sponsored posts in the positive direction if they want repeat orders for adverts.

For this particularly advert, I would say that Review Me is a nice idea for bloggers to raise a small amount of cash, especially if they are interested in reviewing websites or products.

The downside is that people might criticize your blog for going too commercial or accepting ‘bribes’ but I think that as long it’s obvious that you are posting an Ad then it’s not much different from any other kind of advertising.

Anyway, this has been an advert paid for by www.reviewme.com! If anyone buys any adverts from me, you’ll see the posts clearly labeled: ‘Advertisement’.

There’s a new social networking site with a medical slant called Daily Strength.

The idea is to provide a support community for people facing similar life challenges by sharing stories, advice and support.

The site has been started by Doug Hirsch from Yahoo and has a range of health experts who act as advisors to the site.

Via TechCrunch