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10 Reasons Why Nature is the Best in Science 2.0

In the era of web 2.0, we have plenty of opportunities of education and communication in either science or medicine. In this special field (often called science 2.0), Nature Publishing Group has become the leading force and I’ve got 10 reasons for that.

  • Scintilla: Scintilla collects data from hundreds of news outlets, scientific blogs, journals and databases and then makes it easy for you to organise, share and discover exactly the type of information that you’re interested in. You can rate items and recommend them to any colleagues who’ve also signed up to the site.

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  • Precedings: Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review.

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  • Nature Network: Nature Network is the online meeting place for scientists to gather, talk and find out about the latest scientific news and events. Science is an international endeavor and deserves a global stage for discussion. Scientists can also benefit from interactions at the local level.

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  • Connotea: Free online reference management for all researchers, clinicians and scientists. Tags make the difference! Connotea can quickly save and organize links to your references, moreover you can follow the new additions to a tag by RSS.
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  • Nature 2.0: Joanna Scott does a perfect job on Second Nature, the island of Nature Publishing Group in Second Life. Unique speakers, sessions, conferences. We hold our SciFoo lives on sessions on the Second Nature island as well.

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  • Web feeds: You can follow easily the research, reviews, clinical practice and other NPG journals.

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  • Podcasts: A podcast is an audio file with which it becomes even more easier to follow the content of a journal. Each week Nature publishes a free audio show in the field of genetics, physics, medicine and many more.. Every show features highlighted content from the week’s edition of Nature.

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  • Dissect Medicine: Dissect Medicine is a collaborative medical news website, which indexes and ranks international medical news. It spans general interest articles to basic research. Dissect Medicine users submit news items for review with tags and keywords. These are then ranked by the user group. This ensures that only the most relevant, and influential articles will make it as a current headline story.

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  • OTMI: It aims to enable scholarly publishers, among others, to disclose their full text for indexing and text-mining purposes but without giving it away in a form that is readily human-readable. It provides for a range of structured disclosure options, from word vectors (lists of word occurrences with frequency counts) and the presentation of text ‘snippets’ out of narrative order, to the presentation of full text in ‘raw’ or ‘reduced’ form.

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I’m proud to be a member of Nature Group in Second Life. I’m pretty sure Nature will rule the next few years in science 2.0. Maybe, they should make some more steps in order to become the leading force in medicine 2.0 as well, but that’s my problem. Last, but not least, take a look at these interesting posts:

Leave a comment if you don’t agree with me and would like to present an other platform of science 2.0.

RSS and Firefox Add-ons in medicine

I’ve written several times about how you can use RSS in medicine. I’ve featured:

  • PubMed Save Search
  • Third-Party PubMed tools
  • Intelligent RSS
  • Tags, Google Alert and many more

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Source

But here is a new and extremely detailed video about what RSS is and how it is useful. RSS is just awesome! Kudos to the author! Now I have to go and create the RSS feeds of my Technorati pages.

Don’t miss today’s best post of the medical blogosphere, Firefox Add-ons for Molecular and Cell Biologists at Bitesize Bio.

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Open Letter to the Physicians of the World

Dear Medical Professionals,

I’m writing to you to describe why to use web 2.0′s features in your practice.

I’m pretty sure web 2.0, the new generation of web services, will play an important role in the future of medicine. These web tools, expert-based community sites, medical blogs and wikis can ease the work of physicians, scientists, medical students or medical librarians. We, medical bloggers, believe the new generation of web services will change the way medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered.

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In the field of medicine, the most important thing is to get the right information in time. With the tools, services and sites of web 2.0, it’s getting easier and even more comfortable. Those physicians, who want to be up-to-date in their fields, should be open to the improvements and new opportunities of the world wide web.

Let’s take a look at how you can use these tools in your own practice.

Most physicians and scientists I know, go back to PubMed from time to time and search for the old terms to see whether there are new additions to the database. If you use the Save Search function, you can get your PubMed updates via e-mail or RSS. You don’t have to search again and again, just sit back and wait for the next letter containing the newest articles in your field.

If you have to track more and more papers and online journals, then you should start using RSS. It’s the best and most comfortable way of getting the selected information automatically what means you can read the articles of medical journals in one place.

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Medical blogs (web log or internet diary) provide content and express opinion on healthcare that you can never find in a medical paper. As there are plenty of medical blogs out there, and you definitely don’t have enough time to run through all of these blogs and other sites, so blog carnivals are created for you! These carnivals collect the best posts on a subject from time to time.

Reading blogs is even easier and more comfortable with podcasts and videocasts. A podcast is a portable audio file (a videocast is a video file) that you can listen to while working, doing exercises or just sitting in a traffic jam. And these are just some examples of the features of web 2.0, or the so-called medicine 2.0.

You can also take part in constructing the future of medical education in Second Life, the virtual world. Train medical students and nurses in the virtual medical center.

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You can browse among the great medical wikis created and maintained by physicians from around the world (you may start with Ask Dr Wiki). These are databases specifically constructed for physicians who are not IT experts but would like to search easily for medical terms. Moreover, search engines (like Google, Yahoo) don’t select among sources, so many of the medical search results can’t be relevant. But medical search engines use peer-reviewed sources and sites selected by experts providing the most relevant and reliable medical information of the best quality.

Web 2.0 is based on communities and collaboration, that’s why you should join one of the best medical communities at Tiromed.com. Ask a mentor or become a mentor. Upload your CV and find collaborators from around the world, or find a job via this community.

I hope you’re going to be open to these opportunities and you’re going to understand why it’s so crucial to use these tools to keep yourself perfectly up-to-date in your field. Let me know please if you have any kind of questions or would like to know more about these tricks and methods. I’m looking forward to reading your answer.

Regards,

Bertalan Meskó
Medical Student
Medical and Health Science Centre
University of Debrecen

http://Scienceroll.com

7 Tips: How to track the information you need!

Recently, some of the researchers here in Debrecen have asked me how they could track the changes of their field of interest. Even in the field of medicine or science, it’s crucial to be up-to-date and to find methods/tools that can make your work easier and more comfortable. So here are some tips on how to track the information you need, how to be up-to-date in your field.

  • PubMed Save Search:

Most of the physicians and scientists I know, go back to PubMed time by time and search for the old terms to see whether there are new additions to the database. If you use the Save Search function, you can get your PubMed updates via e-mail or RSS. You don’t have to search again and again, just sit back and wait for the next letter containing the newest articles in your field. How? Create an NCBI account, make your regular search and click on the Save Search button:

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Then edit the preferences, that’s all:

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  • Third-Party PubMed tools:

I couldn’t come up with a better expression. These sites/tools are based on PubMed but try to open new ways in searching for different scientific/medical terms. For example, NextBio is a scientific data search engine with which you can use PubMed in a more dynamic way. The CureHunter provides interactive network graphs of related drugs, diseases and therapies. Or take a look at PubMed Reader, a free web-based research program for displaying PubMed / Medline search results on an individual basis. It means you can create your own up-to-date Medline and PubMed literature search.

David Rothman has a lot more!

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Screenshot of CureHunter

  • Use RSS or webfeed!

If you have to track more and more papers and online journals, then you should start to use RSS. It’s the best and most comfortable way of getting the selected information automatically what means you can read the articles in one place. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at some of my interviews with famous bloggers and see how many blogs/journals they follow every day. How? All you need is a feed reader program (like feedreader.com) or log in to your Bloglines, Google Reader or Netvibes account. Then open your favourite medical/scientific journal or blog and click on the feed icon:

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Insert that link into your program; browser or online tool and you made it. Let the information come to you!

  • Use an even better RSS!

Alan at Science of the Invisible pointed out the features of Aide RSS, a new service which is actually a web 3.0 application.

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The service filters the RSS noise by scoring each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it’s been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blog search engines, etc.

It will definitely improve your productivity and makes it even easier to track the content you like. For example, you can get only the good articles or the best ones of a blog or site via RSS, it depends on your decision.

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  • Use tags!

Tags are one of the most important features of web 2.0. Tags help you how to find content absolutely relevant to your needs. If you want to track your field of interest like this, try del.icio.us. If you’re a scientist or a physician, then your site is Connotea. Connotea can quickly save and organize links to your references, moreover you can follow the new additions to a tag by RSS. Here is the example: follow the best/selected articles about medicine 2.0.

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  • BioWizard.com:

I know BioWizard should be in the category of 3rd-party PubMed tools, but I think this service is much more than that. It keeps you up-to-date with the most important published literature as chosen by the global biomedical research community. How does it work?

BioWizard users submit relevant, timely research articles they have found to be useful and interesting. The articles you submit are then read by the rest of the community who promote articles they feel are deserving of recognition. The best articles in a research field are brought to the top page for all to read and discuss.

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Through Biowizard, not just you can track all the papers writing in the field of yours, but you can get the best articles (selected by the scientific community) via e-mail.

  • Google Alert:

If none of these work for you, or you’d prefer an even simplier method, then use Google Alert. It will bring all the recent articles/blogposts to you, all the new results for your search term. Personally, I follow the term personalized medicine via this free service to know about all the new articles written on this topic.

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As it’s so important to be up-to-date in your field, use these simple, free and comfortable methods to track the information you need. If you happen to know more tools/services, don’t hesitate to leave a comment for us.

Related links:

Behind the Scenes of Medical Blogs: MicrobiologyBytes

alancann.jpgI’ve already presented some famous medical bloggers to you. My aim is to get my readers closer to these quality blogs and the bloggers as well. I’d like to convince more and more health professionals/people interested in medicine to create their own blogs by providing interesting “behind-the-scenes” interviews. The sixth blogger in this series is Dr Alan Cann, the blogger of MicrobiologyBytes, Science of the Invisible and the maintainer of microbiologybytes.com.

  • How do you find information for your blog? You certainly read other blogs, journals but do you use RSS reader? How many blogs do you track?

Since I started blogging, I read more than I have ever done. I couldn’t do it without RSS. I feel I need to convert people to the joy of RSS! To help with that, I’ve just written an online tutorial I hope will be helpful for people – and I hope people will give me lots of feedback on how it can be improved. Bloglines is my preferred RSS reader, but I’ve found that when I show people RSS, they have strong preferences which reader they prefer, so I always show people Bloglines, Google Reader and Pageflakes and let them choose which they like best. Since nearly half of the subscriptions to my RSS feed at MicrobiologyBytes are through email subscriptions to the feed rather than through feed readers, I also give them that option, although I try to persuade them not to use email for RSS!

I read around 180 feeds, but this varies from day to day. This is my current list. I have my core feeds that I’ve always read, but I try new feeds out frequently, dropping them if they don’t give me what I’m looking for. About half of them are preformed feeds from blogs, etc, and the rest are generated from keyword searches and tags on a wide variety of websites – that’s how I can rapidly scan so much information in one place.

  • You provide excellent content. Moreover, you create podcasts. How much time does it take to maintain these?

Blush. The podcasts are much more labour-intensive than the blog. It takes between one and two hours a week to produce the podcast, which lasts around five minutes! Ironically, I started the blog as a front end for the podcast to allow search engine discovery, but now in many ways the podcast is a shop window for the blog! I currently have around 1,200 subscribers to the podcast feed and the podcast files get downloaded around 10,000 times a month. More people prefer to download the podcast files directly by clicking on links rather than by subscribing to the feed, but that’s fine.
Now that I feel that I know what I’m doing with the blog, it doesn’t take that long to maintain, a few hours spread across the week – less than when I was experimenting more in the early days. But it varies a lot throughout the year, depending on how busy I am with other work.

  • You are a blogger at Science of the Invisible and you also work on microbiologybytes.com. I think there aren’t any better microbiology sources than microbiologybytes.com. Am I right?

There are other good microbiology blogs, such as Small Things Considered and Aetiology, but they tend not to post as frequently as I do on MicrobiologyBytes. The most important thing is to read as widely as possibly, and access your information from as many sources and as many points of view as you can.
I’d like to explain why I have two blogs. It’s not because I’m greedy! When I started, MicrobiologyBytes had a long format (for a blog) and the front end to the podcasts, and Science of the Invisible was a short format. Gradually, more and more education/technology content crept into SOTI, and so about six months ago I chose to separate them, giving MicrobiologyBytes all the microbiology content (“The latest news about microbiology in a form that everyone can understand”), and putting all the educational stuff into SOTI (“Education costs money. Ignorance costs more.”). At that point, both blogs really took off, so I guess the lesson is to target a particular audience. I don’t think many people regularly read both of my blogs, although a few wander in and out since I put links in the sidebars.
Actually, I’ve got lots of blogs – since I discovered how to use del.icio.us tags to create RSS feeds. I currently have about six: MicrobiologyBytes, SOTI, two del.icio.us miniblogs for the sidebars so I can post items quickly (one and an other), oh, and my Virtual Frogroom blog. I just started another miniblog to cover the UK foot and mouth disease outbreak.

  • Does blogging help your career? Do your colleagues respect what you’ve done on the web?

I think it will do. It’s certainly helped me widen my horizons over the last year, and stay up to date – with technology as well as microbiology. I have a Why Blog? page on MicrobiologyBytes.com to try to encourage other people to think about blogging.

  • What about the microbiology journals? Have they discovered you and your blogs?

Not the academic journals, since publishers still feel blogging is a threat to their income, but news media have discovered blogging, even if they don’t know what to do with it. MicrobiologyBytes is starting to get quoted quite often by journalists. Interestingly, when I started my microbiology website (now at microbiologybytes.com) in 1994, journalists would find out my phone number (which wasn’t on the site) and interrupt me with calls. Now they just quote the blog directly. I’m happy with that, as long as they link back.
I have a very good relationship with the Society of General Microbiology in the UK who have been generous enough to sponsor the podcasts.

  • At last, what are your future plans with your blog?

Well first, to keep going as long as possible – or until a better technology comes along! SOTI is a platform which allows me to explore lots of different technologies which may or may not make it into my teaching eventually – after I’ve had chance to play with them online first. Beyond that, public responses to events such as people flying around the world with XDR-TB and the recent foot and mouth disease outbreak in the UK have started me thinking about how bloggers can contribute to the public good, beyond general education and awareness of science. I’m trying to think of what I might be able to do when the next influenza pandemic strikes – got any ideas?

Thank you, Alan, for the answers. Keep on informing the world about microbiology in several ways!

Behind-the Scenes interviews so far:

7 Tips: How to be up-to-date in genetics/genomics?

As I plan to pledge my life to personalized genetics/genomics and my hobby is writing about the relationship between web 2.0 and medicine, then this is a crucial question to me. I try to give you some tips on how to be up-to-date on the field of genetics/genomics.

1. Follow the most reliable genetic sites:

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2. Follow the best genetic blogs:

3. Use RSS web feed and follow the genetic journals:

Via RSS web feed, you don’t have to run through all of these blogs, sites and journals, but the information will come to you automatically. A fantastic example is Philippe Campeau‘s (OMMBID Blog) list of subscriptions in Google Reader which is public now. You can find there nearly 50 genetic journals.

4. Use services/tools:

I recommend to use UpToDate.com but never forget the words of Ves Dimov:

UpToDate is useful and at least for me, easy to use… How many times I have not found the answer to a clinical question in UpToDate? Many. Then I try Pubmed and the plain Google search which have always been helpful.

I don’t think anybody should be dependent on a single source. If one cannot practice medicine without UpToDate, may be one should not practice at all.

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5. Follow the blog carnivals:

Gene Genie is the blog carnival of genes and gene-related diseases. Its mission is to cover the whole genome before 2082, but it also contains articles on the news of genomics and clinical genetics.

Mendel’s Garden: this carnival is devoted to genetics.

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6. Follow the genetic wikis:

Through this link, you’ll find many genetics-related wikis and Wikimedia projects.

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7. Your choice: how can you be up-to-date in genetics/genomics?

Related articles:

Medicine 2.0: The Second Edition

med320.jpgSteven Murphy was supposed to host today’s edition, but for personal reasons, he asked me to do it this time. So here is Medicine 2.0 again, a new blog carnival on web 2.0 and medicine. More and more blogs are getting closer to this subject as physicians, medical students, health care lawyers and medical librarians all realize the importance of web 2.0 and also understand how these tools, services could help their works.

Uri Ginzburg examines Twitter’s possible role in a hospital. With Twitter, connections can be quicker and elegant. Twitterers, join me there!

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Our favourite star-medical librarian, David Rothman says his hospital’s president and CEO has a blog now and presents a slideshow about how to use RSS in health care.

Ves Dimov has come up with two, web 2.0 based posts. The first mentions the 544 histopathology videos on YouTube, the second mentions VideoJug’s patient education videos. I’ve already written about VideoJug which has best medical video collection of our time.

An other video-post belongs to Aleksandr Kavokin at RDoctor: Gallstones. Star Hospital. Episode 1.1

Michael Barton at Bioinformatics Zen tells us his opinion on Science 2.0. I loved this sentence: Despite all this I am very in favour of open science, and would like to make all my research available for any one who is interested.

A great post again from Scott Shreeve: Bandwagon Unbound: Health 2.0 as an Argumentum Ad Populum? Here is an interesting image from the article:

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Christian Bachmann‘s post, Online health survey proven valid at Med Journal Watch, says that “Two new studies show the growing importance and new prospects of the WWW in medicine.”

GrrlScientist presents Humble Sea Squirt Offers Hope to People With Rare Cancer posted at Living the Scientific Life, saying, “Yet another reason to protect global biodiversity.”

The Official Google Blog asks the question: Is there a doctor in the family? We can’t wait to see what Google can achieve on the field of medicine. Bob Coffield and John Sharp also express their ideas.

I’m a Second Life fan, so I was amazed by the writing of Diane J. Skibe: Nursing Education 2.0: Second Life.

Do you have a research assistant? Rick at My Biotech Life does have one, but for free: Zotero!

Joshua Schwimmer tries to convince us about the usability and importance of podcasts. These are audio files, so you can listen to the blogposts without sitting in front of your computer.

My submission would have been a top 10 list of the best medical sites in Second Life. Let’s watch a mobile quarantine training from Second Life:

Recently, I haven’t found new blogs writing about web 2.0 and medicine, but I just bookmarked this link to a great tool:

BioDownloader is a program for downloading and/or updating files from ftp/http servers. The program has unique features that are specifically designed to deal with bioinformatics data files and server.

On the 8th of July, the third edition will be held at Medical 2.0. Don’t forget to submit your articles in time and to visit the official page of the carnival.

News of the World of Medicine 2.0: The Collection

I know it’s not the time for Medicine 2.0, our blog carnival on web 2.0 and medicine, but I’ve found so many interesting posts and articles that I have to share with you right now:

I am cautiously optimistic. There is still some form of cultural change required for the larger community to get involved in such projects, but with Nature and PLoS taking a leading role, there is hope. I do believe that for these efforts to be truly successful, Science needs to get involved as well.

Creating Twitter webpage for every doctor in your hospital. Even small updates can have a great flow by twitter. Nurses can find you everywhere and anytime if you want to.

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WikiMindmap comes to your rescue by helping you create a auto-mindmap of the wiki topic of your choice. It searches any term on Wikipedia and automatically creates a structured and easy understandable overview of the Wikipedia page of that term.

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I look forward to further contributions in the thinking, defining, and refining of the movement while continuing to learn from, highlight, and combine innovative technologies to “bring into being” the new health care reality.

Presentation slides by the University of Michigan’s Patricia Anderson.

The Britannica Blog (“where ideas matter”) is holding a Web 2.0 Forum, built on Michael Gorman‘s contention that the internet is in the process of rapidly destroying civilization.

When researchers at Harvard University were looking for a gene mutation in a group of rare blood cancers, they turned to Joyce Niblack, who put the word out to an online patient mailing list she manages, spurring more than 300 members to send in mouth swabs and bone-marrow samples.

That’s all folks! Medicine 2.0 has hosts even for August, but I don’t have a host for the 24th of June. So if you feel interested, just let me know.

New additions to my feedreader 4.

rss-icon.jpgHere are the newest additions to my feedreader program. What is that feed? I just let the information come to me. I subscribe to the feeds (or RSS) of my favourite blogs and journals, and they send their articles to me automatically. Without energy and work, I can be up-to-date on my field.

Michael Barton’s thoughts on best practice techniques in Bioinformatics.

It covers the latest advances in personal technology for doctors. – by Dr Chris Paton, Editor

A blog devoted to eHealth and healthcare Information Technology – by John Sharp.

A French blog on web 2.0 and ophtalmology.

My friend and fellow medical student writes this great blog about the special field of tomography.

James specializes in agricultural biotechnology. He’s trained in mass communication and technical writing.

One of the first masters of medicine 2.0.

And don’t forget to bookmark our favourite blog carnival’s site: Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival!Further reading:

Medicine 2.0: the Blog Carnival of Web 2.0 and Medicine

med320.jpgPlease welcome Medicine 2.0, a new blog carnival devoted to the special relationship between web 2.0 and medicine. I’ve been writing about it for a long time now and I see that more and more blogs are getting closer to the the subject. We hope that with these post-collections, we can help physicians, nurses, medical students and all the readers how to use the tools, services of web 2.0 in medicine. Let’s start with an exceptional video about what exactly web 2.0 is:

First, here are the articles of the masters of medicine 2.0:

Ves Dimov presents a short post about Youtube’s role in nursing education and a long one about the improvements of AskDrWiki, a collaborative medical encyclopedia.

David Rothman created a great list of social networks for clinicians.

Victor Castilla features an ongoing series about the core topics of medicine 2.0. My favourite post is Web 2.0 : A Sharing Culture where Victor says: “I hope in the future a culture of sharing with no interest will born.”

Scott Shreeve examines Sermo.com’s business model and shows us how it works.

Bob Coffield has an opinion on the subject as well. Bob and Scott are working hard to create a comprehensive and useful wiki for describing Health 2.0.

Joshua Schwimmer says Flickr donates for Médecins Sans Frontières. That’s how a web 2.0 community could help physicians. He also gives us an introduction to medical podcasts through several posts.

And now, new sites, Flickr, online writing, Second Life and many more fascinating posts of bloggers who are open for the possibilities and advantages of web 2.0 in medicine:

K. S. Descartin wrote a real overview of what medicine 2.0 is about.

Ricardo Vidal talks about an epidemic simulating application which is freely downloadable.

Attila Csordás greatly expressed his opinion on submitting scientific papers written in Word 2007. At last, somebody tells scientists to forget about it and to use online writing services.

Steven Wardell wanted to visually map out the locations of the e-health firms in New England.

Jean-Claude Bradley presents a nice slideshow about his project in Second Life where he tries to find new educational possibilities.

Wade Meredith examines Webtribes, a social network of independent sites each catering to a differently challenged group of people.

Medgadget writes about a new site to tackle childhood obesity and the MEDoctor system where you can store and retrieve your personal electronic medical record.

A Pen mightier than Keyboard is presented at Marketing and Adbits blog. It saves data entry time and allows them to store an electronic copy of your signature.

What about the future?

Walter at HighlightHealth tells us in his post: Web 3.0 and Predictive, Preventive and Personalized Medicine.

I’d like to ask the future hosts to always include a little list of new bloggers who often write about medicine 2.0. So now, here are 3 new blogs:

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I hope you enjoyed the nearly 20 submissions. If you plan to host an edition, contact me. If you’d like to know more about the carnival, please visit the official page at medicine20.wordpress.com. If you write a medicine 2.0 related article, submit it here.

The next issue is due to be published on the 24th of June. Until then, be open for the advantages of medicine 2.0!

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