Category: Uncategorized

Was just sent a pointer to a solid article from the Wall Street Journal, “Social Networking Comes To Healthcare.” The key ‘graph:

“The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized health information online. Patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities that enable them to share information about treatment and coping and build a personal network of friends.”

Interestingly, most of the social networking connections cited were of the patient-to-patient variety, with minimal mention of the patient-provider relationship. That is a definite opportunity area.

(Hat Tip: Charles Donovan)

ZunePhone link.

Very nice visualization from the folks at visual-literacy.org. Click on the graphic to go to the full-screen version, which contains roll-over examples of 100 different ways to get your point across and communicate more clearly. (hat tip: seth)

Bonus links: Visual Thinking School and Communication Nation

Have been doing some development work for a business blogging customer of ours, and again need to send out mad props (that’s what the kids these days say, right?) to John T. Unger and his Typepad Hacks site. A treasure trove!

One very useful bit…putting in active menus into the header. Here’s how to do it:

How to add a horizontal menu to a TypePad blog

And other thing…want to get rid of that annoying border around your TypePad blog’s header? One way to do it is to make the “background” of the header graphic a complementary color to the header graphic, like this. However, John pointed out a little trick that can just make the border simply go away. In the Design tab of your blog, you will see a link that says “Edit Custom CSS” (n.b. it looks like you need to be a Pro member to do this). In the Custom CSS frame, simply put this little chunk of code (“edit the height attribute and the background-image: url, of course,” John adds):

/* banner image */

#banner
{
height: 110px;
background-image:
url(“http://johntunger.typepad.com/typepadhacks/Typepadhackslogo.gif”);
background-position: 0px 0px;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
text-align: left;
}

Poof! Border-be-gone.

Gracias, hermano!

Yes, that little speck in the shot is a surfer.

Half Moon Bay is the home of Mavericks, one of the most grueling big wave rides on the planet. The break is just up the coast from our place, about four miles or so.

Every year, the big wave contest “window” opens up on January 1st, and the 24 surfers who are going to compete go on call. What that means is the contest organizers watch the waves, and swell, and weather patterns, and when everything aligns just so, the contest goes live. At that point, the 24 chosen ones have just 24 hours to get to Half Moon Bay from wherever they are on the planet, get into their wetsuits, and ride the giants.

More on Mavericks here.

Congrats to friend, photog-extraordinaire and dancer Marcy Mendelson, whose ROOT weblog (“a global community for lovers of dance, culture, and music”) is today’s Typepad featured blog of the day. Way to go, Marcy!

photo: Marcy Mendelson

Stowe Boyd: “People are the center of the universe. Not stuff.”

“No resolutions. No promises. No predictions. No expectations.

Goodbye 2006. Hello 2007.”

–David Armano

Well put, friend.

Your results: You are Iron Man
Inventor. Businessman. Genius.


Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

(Spiderman was a close second.)

Had the opportunity to plow through a bunch of books over the last week (Under the Black Flag, Hiaasen’s Nature Girl, the Baker Report, and am currently working on The Omnivore’s Dilemma – more on that one soon). Of all of them, however, the head-and-shoulders best was Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. As my friend Philip would say, fannnnn-great.

Take the discovery and translation of The Secret History of the Mongols, which was hidden from civilization for almost 800 years, lay over the top of it fantastic research and storytelling by author and scholar Jack Weatherford, who traveled thousands of miles on horseback to do his research first-hand, sprinkle it with the opening up and exploration of the Mongolian territory that was the Area 51 of the Soviet Empire…ah, great stuff.

From the cultural shifts, to the storytelling, to the strategy that allowed Genghis Khan to fairly rule an entire continent with only a handful of trusted advisors and warriors, a great read, end-to-end. Highly recommended.