John Naughton from the Guardian looks at which health care sites you can trust as a follow-up to Microsoft’s cyberchondria study. Most of the data he quotes is old, but the general premise comes down to the fact that you have to be very careful how much trust you put in healthcare websites.

Jeff Jarvis follows up on the conversation looking at medicine as information. Jarvis advocates “doctors should act as curators, selecting the best information for their patients and making sure they are better informed.” I like the concept of the doctors helping us sort the good from the bad, but I’m not sure how most health care practicioners feel about losing control of the information.

I got a new Blackberry Bold and it is compatible with the qik live video streaming service so you can check out my latest live video on my qik page or follow me on twitter and check in live whenever you see the live streaming note.

The video quality is decent (320 x 240) for the web, but it is dependent on the quality of the video camera/lens on your cell phone and the speed of your data connection on the cell phone.

When I worked at the newspaper, we played around a lot with qik and it just came available for Blackberries that have video camera built it in– also, it works a lot better on phones with a 3G connection that have a faster data service.

I finished my ubuntu experiment today and went back and wiped my family computer and reinstalled Windows XP. It’s not that I didn’t have a good ubuntu experience, but it’s just my family kept wanting to install programs that only ran on Windows. I finally gave in when my daughter got a Barbie MP3 player for her birthday that only ran on Windows and my wife and I didn’t want her monopolizing our laptops to play with it.

In review here’s how our four months with Ubuntu went…

• Easy to do a basic install and update. Took some work to get my pci wifi card, but installing a wireless hp deskjet was easier on Ubuntu than windows.
• Everyone could sit down and use it without additional instruction– even my three year old.
• Did all the basic great– web browsing, opened word documents, spreadsheets, powerpoints.
• Ran all of the above much faster than Windows XP on my family computer with less than a gig of RAM.
• Free operating system and free software– even used GIMP to edit photos.

I’ve had the privilege of serving on a couple of jurors– both of which convinced me that I would probably be better off with a bench trial rather than a juror of my peers. The Sun newspaper reports another strike against the jury system as a british juror asked her facebook friends what they thought about the trial she was serving on. The woman posted details of the case on Facebook and added, “I don’t know which way to go, so I’m holding a poll.”

At least the story reports that the juror was kicked off the case and might possibly face a contempt of court trial. I’m trying to remember back to my jury instructions and the video they played for us. I can’t recall anything about not asking my facebook friends about the verdict, but of course we were told not to discuss the trial with anyone.

Reuters reports that Facebook is considering buying twitter if the details can be agreed upon. Facebook already offers the “update– tell me what you’re doing” service that twitter has, but twitter has focused on status and mobile where facebook builds a whole social network.  In fact my twitter account automatically updates by facebook status.

This purchase makes complete sense since Facebook does not yet have a profitable business model and neither does twitter.  The reported $500 million that Twitter is asking is based on Microsofts $15 billion investment in Facebook last year. Facebook is trying to arrange an all stock transaction.

TIVO has introduced their mobile site for controlling your TIVO. It’s at m.tivo.com.  Let’s hope it works better than the web based service for programming your TIVO or the TIVO season pass system.

Don’t get me wrong, we love our TIVOs, but I think the usability of the menu to record and edit programs stink. We used to have a dish DVR and I thought it had a much better interface for recording programs than the TIVO. I have used the web based my TIVO programming function, but it lacks the functionality that you need to see everything that you’ve programmed and where they conflict– especially when you need it for a two TIVO family.

Do you have cyberchondria? Are you always googling what’s hurting today to figure out what you have and coming up with a new fatal disease every new day? For example, when you searched for headaches did you see all the articles about brain tumors or find the ones about caffeine withdrawal? Although the chance of having a brain tumor is small, you probably found those articles first.

Well, you’re not alone. A recent study of more than 500 Microsoft employees who answered a survey on their medical search habits revealed that more than half said that online medical queries related to a serious illness had interrupted their day-to-day activities at least once. In the study on cyberchondria the researchers examined how medical searches can be made to give more relevant results. Health information professionals should try to create search engines that are able to detect medical queries and offer advice that did not automatically make Web searchers fear the worst.

Seth Godin has a great post on his blog about the NY Times struggle to remain profitable (and if the Times is struggling so is everyone else) and some advice about where they missed the boat. He concludes with this point that is really relevant for any business to ask whether they are all about looking back and maintaining their position or moving forward to find their next business model.

I guess it’s about the difference between:

• senior management playing defense, supporting and protecting the status quo and avoiding offending the elders upstairs vs.
• using existing momentum and clout to build assets for the next business.

I admit that maintaining your current business model is important to maintaining profitability, but many times businesses fail to think of the future. Many newspapers owners lived high from their publications high profit margins and failed to reinvested and find the next business model and are suffering the consequences today.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true for me– there and back again. I have bounced around between a couple of places and a couple of different types of jobs. Everyone once in a while I’ll throw a new place in the rotation and here I go again back to a new place that I added last fall.

It’s a long story that as I gain some perspective I hope I will be able to tell it all, but the short of it is soon I will be at UAMS in Little Rock running their Web Center helping them to launch their new consumer site and get a CMS running to standardize their edu site.

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