Sermo with Doctors

Joshua Porter of Bokardo points to the physicians' network, Sermo, as one of the new specialized social networks online. According to the Sermo site, the business model "is one of information arbitrage, the opportunity that arises when breaking medical insights intersect with the demand for actionable, market-changing events in healthcare" and "Sermo technology is the first of its kind to authenticate and credential physicians in real-time. Our state-of-the-art technology is working behind the scenes, re-validating physicians every time they sign in..."

For example, Sermo Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., generally charges $100,000 to $150,000 a year to nonmedical businesses like hedge funds, which use it to research such things as how doctors feel about new drugs. The site, founded by Daniel Palestrant while he was a surgical resident in Boston [was] launched last year... Snippets from the Wall Street Journal

Sermo partners with the American Medical Association, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, the University of Michigan's School of Information Science, and Northwestern University. "By collaborating with Sermo, these partners have accessed a new research tool, opening the door to more efficient research, and increased opportunities for grant funding and research publications."

Cold Hearted Web 2.0?

William Davies writes in the Cold, Cold Heart of Web 2.0:

The same technological zeal and business acumen that once was applied to improving the way we buy a book or pay our car tax is now being applied to the way we engage in social and cultural activities with others.
In short, efficiency gains are no longer being sought only in economic realms such as retail or public services, but are now being pursued in parts of our everyday lives where previously they hadn't even been imagined. Web 2.0 promises to offer us ways of improving the processes by which we find new music, new friends, or new civic causes. The hassle of undesirable content or people is easier to cut out. We have become consumers of our own social and cultural lives.

Thanks to Joshua Porter of Bokardo for pointing to this, and related pieces: Gong Szeto on the subprime meltdown and Nicholas Carr on the Automation of Social Life.

Editing Wikipedia

Thanks to for TechDirt for pointing to the new Wikipedia scanner service by Virgil Griffith. It lists anonymous Wikipedia edits from interesting organizations.

Wired is maintaining a running tally of the most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs. One might have expected such efforts from Scientology, and both national political parties, but ... employees of the New York Times? Disney? MySpace? Diebold? Microsoft AND its PR firm, Waggener Edstrom? the National Security Agency?

The Social Side of Design

Joshua Porter of Bokardo has an interesting piece, You Can't Be Social By Yourself on designing the user experience and social design. He points to Connecting Through Technology, not With It, Crysta Metcalf's recent piece on social design. Gong Szeto commented that perhaps technology enabled communication is neither synchronous nor asynchronous, but in-between, more like bas-relief.

Earlier, Porter initiated a lively discussion about design and art. Here's the original article, 5 Principles to Design By, an update focused on the relationship between art and design, and his summary of the most interesting quotes.

Spokesblogging

Valleywag has a sharp piece on "spokesblogging": a web writer, often financially strapped, who lends his or her name to a corporate marketing effort, a commercial transaction often disguised by some jargon, such as conversational marketing.

The example under derision is Cisco's new tagline, "the human network"

...the original article on the "human network" on Wikipedia, together with a convenient link back to an advertorial page hosted by Federated Media. On that page, quotes from Phil Torrone of Make Magazine, Matt Haughey of Metafilter, David Pescovitz of Boing Boing -- and Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, of course. All explaining what the "human network" -- the Cisco slogan -- meant to them. They were just making conversation. Sure.

BowBlog makes the point that

[The well-known bloggers] are not journalists and only barely publishers – they’re over-excited participants in a business and media revolution and they really do have a defense: ignorance.

They just didn't know there was anything wrong with carrying those two innocent words. Their publisher, though, is different. Federated Media is a sophisticated business, an interesting, web-native publishing network – a business advancing a promising model in an uncertain medium. They should have known better.

Building Social Web Applications

Joshua Porter of Bokardo has a new short series on building social web applications. He notes a common pitfall:

...there is no way to design a perfect social web site that doesn’t need ongoing management. Yet, some social start-ups fail to recognize this and launch their app without a designated caretaker. The result is a slow failure…the worst kind of failure because it’s not immediately apparent that it’s happening.

He also points to the importance of archived how-to information, such as Evoca's knowledgebank.

People have the same problems over and over again and the community manager spends more and more time answering the same questions.

Mike Haughey, founder of Metafilter, has seven tips for running a successful online community on Fortuitous. They include

Moderation is a full-time job, and use metrics to spread out the work, such as the user flags used by Craigslist.
Give people more than a generic, often anonymous, comment form for real contributions and participation from others.

The Groups and the Faithful in SL

Wagner James Au provides a reasonable picture (below) of the social circles of SL.



He also notes that efforts to create a non-denominational group of the faithful in SL have again collided with real world issues in a recent New World Notes.

New Yahoo! Research Team

According to c|net news, Yahoo is expected to announce today that two scientists in the areas of economics and sociology will head up its research in online markets and social networks.

R. Preston McAfee, the J. Stanley Johnson professor of business, economics and management at the California Institute of Technology, will be a vice president and research fellow leading Yahoo's microeconomics research group.

Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he was director of the Collective Dynamics Group, and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, will lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving.