To my surprise, I was approved as an “official conference blogger” for MLA 2008.

All MLA 2008 conference bloggers:

Stewart Brower - Professional Notes

A’Lyn Ettien - The Creature from the Health Informatics Class

Marie Kennedy - Organization Monkey

Maureen ‘Molly’ Knapp - LSUHC New Orleans Health Sciences Center

Michelle Kraft - The Krafty Librarian

Leigh Mihlrad - Leigh’s Little Corner of the Web

Emily Molanphy (Emily has 2 blogs!) - Emily’s Journal - and - Eponymous Blog about Libraries

Bryan Nugent - The Universe of Medical Librarianship

David Rothman - davidrothman.net

Eric Schnell - The Medium is the Message

For reasons I haven’t yet been able to determine, they decided to aggregate all posts about MLA 2008 from each of these blogs on a page at a WetPaint wiki …but don’t provide an aggregated feed. So here’s a feed I slapped together in Yahoo! Pipes.

Here’s that same feed, previewed with FeedSweep:

I’ll put together a feed that pulls from more than official sources (sort of like the one I set up for CIL2008) next week and will elaborate on the MLA2008 GroupTweet I set up that’ll allow MLA attendees who use Twitter to conveniently send a tweet to all other MLA 2008 Twitter users from a laptop, cell phone, or other mobile device.

I’m bringing with me to Chicago these newfangled devices for the digital recording of sound and images (both still and moving)- so expect at least a little of that sort of stuff to appear here between 5/17 and 5/21.

:)

Hope you feel the same way and will be here when regular posting resumes.

Thanks!

-David

Reason 1:
I must try to finish a writing project (about which I’ll write more soon).

Reason 2:
I must make sure I’m well-prepared for my visit to Wisconsin at the end of the week.

Reason 3:
I need to keep refining my materials for MLA 2008. I’m not happy with them yet.

I’m not pleased to put off the blogging, but with the commitments I’ve made to others it is the only thing I can (in good conscience) put on the back burner.

Next week, I plan to put up a few posts about the AMA conference last week and some of the interesting things I learned there.

Also keeping me busy lately: Liz and I are expecting a baby in early July.

More about that next week, too.

:)

Hakia says they’re tapping the expertise of librarians. As CEO Dr. Riza C Berkan writes on the Hakia blog:

Every Web search starts with two queries. One is X. The other one is “who knows X the best?” Because finding X is not enough if the author of that page does not know X himself/herself. This will immediately resonate with you if you ever searched for medical, legal, or financial information for a serious case.

This was called the “credibility” criteria in the old world-order which has progressively vanished in the new age of Internet search engines. You enter X, and get the same “popular” perspective without distinction of credibility. You may recognize some of the sources, but are you an expert yourself about these things?

Ironically, there is a science for this. It is the science of libraries and librarians. That’s their job. They know what is credible, trustworthy, and commercially-unbiased.

So how does Hakia leverage librarian expertise? They say it is by indexing “quality sources” which are “taken from the Medical Library Association recommendations.”

That’s a great idea of where to start, but anyone could accomplish the same by making a Google CSE like this one. The Google Health Co-op greatly surpasses Hakia’s effort here by including a greater number of recommended sites and greater value from having more authoritative recommenders than just the MLA.

Also interesting is that Hakia has created a little micro-portal for each of the following sites:

PubMed - http://pubmed.hakia.com
World Health Org - http://who.hakia.com
ClinicalTrials.Gov - http://clinicaltrials.hakia.com
Centers for Disease Control - http://cdc.hakia.com
The National Cancer Institute - http://nci.hakia.com
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute - http://nhlbi.hakia.com

Mayo Clinic - http://mayoclinic.hakia.com
familydoctor.org - http://familydoc.hakia.com
Healthfinder - http://healthfinder.hakia.com
HIV InSite - http://hivinsite.hakia.com
Kidshealth - http://kidshealth.hakia.com
Medem - http://medem.hakia.com
MEDLINEplus - http://medlineplus.hakia.com
NOAH - http://noah.hakia.com
American Cancer Society http://acs.hakia.com
Cancer Care, Inc. - http://cancercare.hakia.com
Oncolink - http://oncolink.hakia.com
Women’s Cancer Network - http://womenscancernet.hakia.com
American Diabetes Assc. - http://ada.hakia.com
diabetes123 - http://diabetes123.hakia.com
Children with Diabetes - http://childrenwithdiabetes.hakia.com
The Diabetes Monitor - http://diabetesmonitor.hakia.com
Joslin Diabetes Center - http://joslinharvard.hakia.com
National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases - http://niddk.hakia.com
American Heart Association - http://aha.hakia.com
Congenital Heart Information Network - http://tchin.hakia.com
March of Dimes - http://marchofdimes.hakia.com

These are also interesting, but superior results could be achieved using existing tools. Rather than searching Hakia’s portal for the American Heart Association for myocardial infarction, we could more easily search Google for myocardial infarction site:americanheart.org and make use of Google’s further refinements from there.

Until Tuesday afternoon, I need to get some writing projects done and make preparations to be away from work for the rest of the week.

I’m flying to San Diego Tuesday afternoon for the American Medical Association’s 28th Annual Medical Communications Conference. I’m excited about serving on this panel partially because I’m acquainted a little with Craig Stoltz and Jason Bhan.

Craig is a former health editor for the Washington Post, a former editorial director for Revolution Health, and a sharp guy I’ve enjoyed talking with. Last week, Craig’s Web 2.Oh…really? blog was recognized by TIME magazine as one its “Top 25″- and Craig (rightly) responded with an excellent critique of the feature in a post titled “In Which I Unwisely Bite the Hand That Feeds Me.”

I’ve had the pleasure of a longish phone conversation with Dr. Jason Bhan, Chief Medical Officer of Ozmosis. We had intended to talk solely about Ozmosis, but we turned out to have a number of similar perspectives and I’m looking forward to chatting more with Dr. Bhan.

Some sessions I’m looking forward to attending:

• A medical/media professional’s guide to Advanced Google™: Tips for effective surfing
  (Taught by medical librarian and LIS professor Dr. Ellen Detlefsen, PhD)
• Using the Internet to stay on top of medical information
  (Also taught by Dr. Detlefsen)
• How, when, and (most importantly) why: Best practices for healthcare blogging
  (Taught by Craig Stoltz)

So I probably won’t be blogging much this week…but reserve the right to change my mind.

If you’re going to be at the conference, please say hello!

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Patricia Anderson and Jill Hurst-Wahl convinced me to give Twitter a third try, and I’m glad they did.

Twitter is fun and I enjoy it, but wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much if I wasn’t using Twhirl as a desktop client. If you try Twitter, here’s my advice:

1. Find the friends you want to try following and follow them.
2. Download and install Twhirl.
3. Leave Twhirl running in the background while you work. If you see a tweet that interests you or makes you want to respond, do. If the tweets you see don’t engage you, they’re easy to ignore after a quick glance.

mon.itor.us

Exactly what is mon.itor.us?

mon.itor.us provides a “24 x 7” network and website monitoring service to help its users quickly identify faults and deficiencies to ensure continuous operations of their IT infrastructure and maintain business operations that provide the ultimate web experience. Particularly mon.itor.us provides personalized Ajax dashboard interface, checks server performance and availability, generates uptime reports, tracks visitors, checks CPU, memory and other systems resources, and alerts its users in case abnormalities are detected. External end-user checks are performed from geographically dispersed servers as well from customer locations. Internal checks can be performed inside of network firewalls through smart agents.

Alerts are delivered via email and/or RSS. I receive mine via email and set my Gmail account to forward alerts to my cell phone so I know as soon as possible if there is a problem with my site and am alerted when it gets back to normal.

Just recently, Hope has rolled out another neat project called ScanGrants.

ScanGrants is designed to facilitate the search for funding sources to enhance individual and community health. The funding sources listed here may be of interest to virtually anyone associated with the health field – medical researchers, social workers, nurses, students, community-based health educators, academics and others.

Funding sources most frequently listed here include those of private foundations, corporations, businesses, and not-for profit organizations. Finding and listing less traditional funding opportunities is also a priority. Federal and state funding sources are typically not included on ScanGrants because they are readily available on other sites (e.g. www.grants.gov).

ScanGrants was developed as a tool for Samaritan Health Services and its collaborators, but it is also available for use by the general public. The listing is selective and is intended to supplement other search methods. In many instances, grant announcements have been abbreviated for the sake of brevity. To view the full grant announcement, click on the link to the source URL provided for each funding opportunity.

ScanGrants has an RSS feed and email subscription option for each grant category or you can search the site and subscribe to a feed of your search results.

This is a great idea and a terrific, useful (and really good-looking) service for Samaritan Health Services to share with the world.

So I subscribe to lists using a Gmail account. Here’s why:

• Separating list emails into a separate account allows me to treat them, as a whole, in a different manner than emails from higher-priority senders (patrons, co-workers, etc.). This lets me keep my attention focused where it needs to be.
• Because list emails are in a separate account, I also never have to annoy other list subscribers with “out-of-office” messages that get sent to whole list- because there’s never need to turn on an “out-of-office” message for this account.
• Threaded conversation: Instead of having one line per each email received, Gmail inboxes have one line for each conversation. That means that my Gmail lists inbox doesn’t get as cluttered. It also lets me efficiently manage whole conversations instead of individual emails, even if a particular email is sent to multiple lists I subscribe to. Example image below shows that all (23) emails on the topic of “abortion” being made a stopword in POPLINE are one (expandable) line item in my Gmail inbox:
  
• Mute function: If there’s a particular conversation(/thread) that I’m not interested in continuing to follow, I can “mute” the conversation and not need to see any further emails in that thread.
  
• Gmail’s search capabilities are awesome. If I want to find a MEDLIB-L email I remember was sent by Michelle Kraft about OvidSP, I can search for label:medlib-l from:Kraft OvidSP and find it really, really quickly.
• Gmail’s filters are powerful and easy to use.
  • Assigning labels: You can set up your Gmail filters to automatically assign colorful labels based on information that lets you scan your email quickly. For example, you could set your account up to automatically assign colored labels based on which list the conversation is from.
    
  • Forwarding based on content: You can combine Gmail’s great searching and filtering to monitor your list subscriptions. Say you subscribe to multiple lists, but only really want to pay attention if Young Adult services are mentioned. I can create a filter from the search for young OR youth OR “YA” and set any hits from that search to be automatically forwarded to my primary email address so it comes to my attention. Imagine the time saved by not having to manually look through all those emails for mentions of the topic I want to follow.

Bonus tip: Would you rather read your list email information in your feed aggregator? Set your lists Gmail account to forward the emails to MailBucket, and MailBucket will give you the content in an RSS feed.