Welcome to Digital Mobs

A husband writes an impassioned letter on one of the popular Internet bulletin boards denouncing a college student he suspects of having an affair with his wife.  Immediately, throngs of people join in the attack, and within days the numbers grow to tens of thousands, with “teams of strangers hunting down the student, hounding him out of his university, and causing the family to barricade themselves inside the home."  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/.

Get organized, get $$

OrganizedWisdom is a human-powered search engine that launched in 2006. A couple of weeks ago, it raised $2.3 million in a Series A round led by ETF Venture Fund, Esther Dyson, and a number of other investors. As Tech Crunch puts it, OrganizedWisdom is a "member of the very-crowded health advice space, and sees competition from the likes of WebMD and HealthLine."

Revolution Health's health?

Just as I was starting to look for something to blog about today, I got an e-mail from a client asking what I know about whether Revolution Health is going under or merging or otherwise transforming itself. Launched officially in April 2007, Revolution Health was intended by its chairman/CEO, AOL co-founder Steve Case, to . . .well, revolutionize health care by providing health-related online tools and content from a variety of trusted sources and enabling individuals to take greater control of their health management.

Grad students designing the future

The Health Horizons Program often uses "iBuyRight" as a signal of the impact of mobile phone technology. It is an application that can provide shoppers with social and environmental information about a product, enabling them to make purchases aligned with their personal values. iBuyRight was developed as a thesis project by some graduate students at UCBerkeley's School of Information.

Online relief is in sight for pain sufferers

Another interesting health app I have recently discovered is called ReliefInsite. It bills itself as a source of secure online pain management services, offering real-time pain mapping, monitoring, and analysis. I was struck by its three-pronged approach--it's home page targets patients themselves, health care companies, and health care providers.

A standout (?) among examples of Health 2.0 apps

The ReadWriteWeb blog offers this list of favorite Health 2.0 sites. Many will be familiar to HH members, but one relatively new entrant--Carol.com--stands out for being different. It is not a social networking site; rather, it is a health care marketplace. Limited in scope (for now) to the Minneapolis-St.

Another entry into the online health search engine/social networking platform space

iMedix bills itself as a new way to find and share health information. Its home page features quotes from various media sources proclaiming its greatness, including this one from the New York Times: "iMedix could revolutionize the way people take care of themselves."

An online health search authority figure

I confess that I have never heard of Aaron Wall, but according to the Med Tech Sentinel blog, he is quite knowledgeable about search engine optimization. Check out this post to learn more about what he has to say about online health.

More on the accuracy of online health information (and a digression into Web 3.0)

Last week, I posted an entry about a recent study reported in Cancer about the accuracy of health information available online. Today, there is news from the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. Its latest report posits that information prominently displayed in search engine results is often not only misleading and confusing, but also potentially dangerous for patients.

Social networking comes to the life sciences

Last month, Collexis announced the launch of BioMedExperts.com, an online social networking site that is being billed as the MySpace for research scientists want to find and connect with others who share their research interests. The BioMedExperts website explains that it connects scientists

to each other through the display and analysis of the networks of co-authors with whom each investigator works to publish scientific papers.

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