Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have just been on-stage at the D Conference.

The videos of Gates and Jobs are now up on the D website:

http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/video-steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-prologue/

DentalDiscussion.com is a new website for dentists and dental students. The site contains Anatomy animations, Articles about Dentistry and a Community Discussion forum.

Via Digg:

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

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.

I’ve just been updating Doctors’ Gadgets.com. The site has news and discussion about PDAs, EMR and other gadgets that doctors use.

It’s also the host to the video tutorials that accompany the RSM Press book, “The Doctors’ PDA and Smartphone Handbook“.

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.

Goolge has posted it’s top search terms of 2006 in it’s annual Zeitgeist:

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

NB: Note that Google tinkers with these results to remove offensive and even common search terms. The results are also determined by growth and traffic and not just how many times they are typed into the search engine. For a more detailed explanation see the Google Blog.

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’.

The BMJ recently published a paper written by a team of Australian doctors testing the use of Google as a diagnostic tool.

The article concluded that “Our study suggests that in difficult diagnostic cases, it is often useful to “google for a diagnosis.”Web based search engines such as Google are becoming the latest tools in clinical medicine, and doctors in training need to become proficient in their use.”

The study found that the correct diagnosis was found in 58% of cases.

At first glance only finding the correct diagnosis on only half of cases seems pretty poor (especially compared to what you would expect from a real life doctor).

However, getting any diagnosis correct is a considerable achievement for a tool not built specifically for this purpose and getting over half right is certainly significant. It may even be useful practically in difficult cases where experienced doctors may be looking for suggestions they hadn’t thought of.

It will be interesting to see how this figure progresses over time. How long will it take (if ever) for a search engine like Google to approach the accuracy rate of healthcare professionals.

Google currently doesn’t have access to the range of databases and research available to other diagnositic engines such as Isabel. Perhaps when more databases and research papers are indexed it’s rate of correct diagnosis will increase.

There has been a wide ranging discussion on this paper on the blog-o-sphere:

The IT for Healthcare Blog highlights the authors concerns about patient’s self-diagnosing with Google and points to this counter argument in Modern Healthcare.

The Clinical Cases weblog wonders whether the “wisdom of the crowd” basis of search engines is good enough to be relied upon for diagnosis making.

Tom Roper and Phil Bradley wonder why more medical librarians aren’t publicly commenting on the issue.

The Krafty Librarian has answered this call pointing out that the 58% success rate is only marginally better than flipping a coin.