Author: Editor

Doctors who aren’t on Twitter are missing out. Really.
That conclusion came through loud and clear from recent conversations I had with several physicians in the small Ontario city of Kingston recently. These individuals represented the whole spectrum of the medical profession from student, to primary care community care doc to specialists and academic teachers.
Given that only an estimated 1 in 10 Canadian doctors uses Twitter even now, it was somewhat surprising how adamant these physicians were about the benefits of the tool for medical professionals, as well as patients and the public.
They were very clear that they felt Twitter represented a unique channel for providing new connectivity between doctors, between medical teachers and students, and between physicians and other members of the community.
Many of those I interviewed had come to Twitter via non-medical routes – one initially used Twitter for traffic reports, another to connect with…

A support group  has many potential benefits, some of which include improving coping skills, reducing anxiety, depression, isolation, ignorance about the condition and others.  Online patient communities (OPCs) are a recent phenomenon.  Some are open (with respect to type of member or fee) and some are more focused and closed.  Irrespective of the type, OPCs have blossomed. It is a major indication of social media’s penetration into healthcare (or vice versa) and why physicians need to establish a presence in social media.  While there are still reasons why support groups are popular, OPCs have definite advantages. I will highlight a few of them.

1.    Many patients and caregivers cannot physically attend a support group. In the early phase of a support group of patients with implantable defibrillators I led for over 20 years, I was informed of scheduling conflicts and transportation difficulties (some patients coming from distances…

Librarians have been geeking out, or grossing out, over hashtags since they first appeared. Some of the conversation has been about concerns over ‘allowing’ the public to define their own metadata, while much of it has been the flip side of trying to engage the public in generating metadata for library online collections, and thus enriching access and awareness for those collections.

Naturally, the general public simply move forward with creating new hashtags for their own purposes, largely unaware of the conversations and concerns of professionals in the area of metadata. This is as it should be. The idea of a Folksonomy, a.k.a. folk taxonomy, as originated by Thomas Vanderwal centers around the social aspect — real people, real folk, coming up with language that means something to them to describe content that matters to them with ideas that matter to them. Meaning.

I could go on about this for…