Twitter News: It is not evil May 12, 2009

I would like to share 4 interesting posts with you. All of them focus on Twitter and how it can be used in medicine:

• Twitter goes Viral: Swine Flu Outbreak – Twitter a Dangerous Hype? (Laika’s MedLibLog)

• How is Twitter influencing public health (Ivor Kovic)

Using Twitter while sitting will burn around 100 calories per hour. That means you will need about 5 hours to burn one McDonald’s Big Mac (570 calories). And if you are an average American, 37 hours to burn what you ate in one day.

• Medical students on twitter (Osler’s Node): A huge list of medical students who use Twitter.

• Twitter is evil. Elsevier is evil. Wikipedia is evil. (Librarians Matter)

1. Twitter, Elsevier and Wikipedia should be legally stopped before they can do any more damage?

2. There is no context in which Twitter, Elsevier and Wikipedia will be a reliable or useful information source?

3. Librarians don’t need understand the many different ways  Twitter can be used, the funding patterns of academic journals nor how references are quality controlled in Wikipedia?

Nope. Librarians need to understand how information on Twitter, in academic journals and Wikipedia  is created, distributed, re-used, re-purposed and the criteria for sensible evaluation.