ReadWriteWeb

Practice Fusion is a startup making waves in the health 2.0 market. The product is a free, web-based EMR (electronic medical record) system for physicians. It runs in the browser and has been marketed as a 'Google Apps for doctors', providing patient management, scheduling, secure email and more.

The business model is largely serving ads, which allows the product to be free - although users can pay $250 $100 per month for an ad-free version. The company has just announced it has signed up 1,300 medical professionals since launch in November of 2007 and is currently serving "more than a quarter million patients."

Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, and Photo Gallery. Today, Microsoft has re-launched the site as a community site, where users can exchange information and ideas about how to best use these tools. As Marty Collins, the Windows Live senior marketing manager explained to us in an interview last week, the idea behind this redesign is to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

This year the Web 2.0 Summit conference (5-7 Nov) is hosting an auction to benefit a few innovative organizations that are solving big problems.

To show our support for this initiative, ReadWriteWeb is running a competition in this post. We have 2 full conference passes to give away to the New York Web 2.0 Expo 16-19 Sept (value over $1000 each), as well as a free Expo hall pass (value $100).

ESME, the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, is an experimental communication project developed for SAP's 'Demo Jam' by a group of 24 collaborators. It's a red hot vision of a Twitter-like experience behind the firewall.

While not yet publicly available, ESME aims to bring all the best things about Twitter to global business communication. Rapid collaboration, network effects leveraged for support, multiple interfaces and some advanced features that Twitter itself doesn't yet offer. Check out the demo video embedded below.

Teachstreet today announced that it has expanded the reach of its network from Seattle, WA, to Portland, OR. TeachStreet is a marketplace where teachers can list classes they offer and allows them to connect with prospective students. The range of classes offered by teachers on the site range from bike maintenance to herpetology, with a good dose of various crafts, yoga, and music lessons thrown in for good measure. Right now, the site features close to 55,000 different classes and instructors.

We love us some Greasemonkey, the Firefox plug-in that lets users run simple scripts on top of their favorite web pages to add new functionality or remove unwanted distractions. At first blush Greasemonkey might seem more technical than many users feel comfortable with, but running the scripts is really just like adding a plug-in to a plug-in. Give it a try with Gina Trapani's Better Gmail 2, the top social media scripts we wrote about in May or Hao Chen's awesome FriendFeed scripts.

But what about the iPhone? Greasemonkey on the iPhone would be the ultimate interface hack for what's got to be the best interface available today. Enter GreasePocket, an experimental effort to provide just that.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.

Mercora, which last year renamed itself to Social.fm, was one of the earliest entrants into the music discovery market and launched to generally favorable reviews in early 2005. Now, however, as GigaOm reports, Social.fm has shut down its service and its web site only displays blank pages (though Google managed to cache a goodbye message). Social.fm was built upon a very interesting P2P architecture, but it couldn't compete against services like Last.fm, iLike, or Pandora, all of which work right from the browser without the need to install a local client first.

Songbird, the desktop music player powered at its core by Mozilla technology, has recently released a new version: Songbird 0.7 (RC). This release offers several new features for the player, including Last.fm support and a refreshed UI. For music lovers, this new version is definitely worth a look.

The Beijing Olympics starts in a few days and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. This is the first in a series of posts that will look at the Web technologies powering this year's Olympics.

One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.