Google to Store Patient Health Records

Google continues its quest to take over the world with a new program to store health records online. Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet search leader. The pilot project to ...

Professors on Facebook

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece on the pluses and minuses of professors joining Facebook. It creates some social issues, with some students feeling that their free speech zone has been invaded by the enemy and some profs worrying about fraternizing with those whom they are in charge of evaluating. It also provides ...

Who Uses MySpace and Facebook?

Eszter Hargittai has done an in-depth study of the social media usage of college students and finds distinct demographic differences between those who use Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster. What's particularly interesting to me is that Facebook is easily the market leader overall but not among those from down-market demographics. Research has shown that people use Facebook especially to ...

Republican Facebook Parody

People for the American Way have produced Right-Wing Facebook, a a fairly clever play on the Facebook news feed phenomenon: Josh Levy posted it Friday evening and it seems to have gone viral, with several bloggers in my RSS feed posting it today, including Henry Farrell, Ezra Klein, Alex Massie, and Matt Yglesias posting it today. Once again, Ron Paul gets shafted, ...

Content King Online, Not Search or Commerce

A new survey finds that, "over the past four years, the primary role of the Internet has shifted from communications to content." Pam Horan, president of survey sponsor Online Publishers Association, says, "[The Internet now handles] traditionally offline activities, such as getting news, finding entertainment information or checking the weather." It's strange to me that content wouldn't have always ...

Stinson Tops Ecosystem

Earlier today, I was looking at the venerable TTLB Ecosystem while doing research and discovered that Matt Stinson's blog had ascended to the very top of the link rankings. I was surprised, indeed, given that the blog had been essentially defunct for more than a year and clicked through to see what Stinson was up to that might have ...

Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?

I've never found the social media sites to be particularly useful. I've tried Orkut, Gather, and a few others and just never found a benefit that exceeded the time investment required. Facebook seemed to be different. I joined a few months back and actually found myself visiting a few times a day to see what various ...

Ron Paul Tops John McCain in Cash on Hand

Ron Paul reports $2.4 million in cash remaining in his campaign coffers, compared to just $2 million for John McCain. George Stephanopoulos apparently broke the story: Though often regarded as a longshot candidate for president, Republican Ron Paul tells ABC News that he has an impressive $2.4 million in cash on hand after raising an equal amount during the second quarter, putting ...

The Whole World Really Isn’t Watching

Thomas Friedman is very, very afraid of bloggers. When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. ...

Online Social Networkers ‘Chronically Unfaithful’

A new report on "Web 2.0 and the New Net" finds that "social networkers have little loyalty for any specific social networking site. Almost half of all social networkers use more than one site and one in six uses three or more." BizReport's Helen Leggatt adds, Forty percent of MySpace users maintain a profile on other social networking sites such ...