According to Manhattan Research, a healthcare market research company, personal health records (PHR) are slowly becoming more popular in the U.S., but concerns about privacy and a lack of understanding, as well as doubts about the efficiency of PHRs are holding back widespread adoption. Only about 7 million adults in the U.S. actually use PHRs. Especially those without serious illnesses often don't see the need for using electronic health records.
Feedly, a magazine style feed reader that syncs with Google Reader, just released a very interesting and useful integration with Mozilla's Ubiquity. Ubiquity gives Firefox a command-line interface that makes tasks like bookmarking a page on delicious, sending a quick message to Twitter, or searching Google and Flickr as easy as typing in a few letters without ever having to use the mouse. Among many other things, feedly's Ubiquity integration now lets you share any Web page on Google Reader and send a tweet with a link through Ubiquity.
Few websites have made a bigger impact on the world than Wikipedia has and today the organization is celebrating its 8th birthday. Not content to rest on its laurels, Wikipedia is gearing up for the future with new a new structured data search integration with Yahoo!, 24 times as much media storage space as it had this time last year and goals to integrate with media sites like Flickr.
This year Wikipedia survived the launch of Google's Knol, a product many feared Google would give favorable treatment, served up its pages to nearly 700 million unique viewers and launched its first official mobile version of the site. What's next? Big, tech-centered plans.
A funny thing happened on the way to the airport. I searched through the iTunes App Store on my iPhone for a Southwest app that allowed for flight check-ins, only to find that it didn't exist. I don't know why I expected it to be there, but I did. Southwest is one of those companies that seems so "with it" when it comes to this digital age we live in. They have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a flickr account, and a YouTube channel. So why no iPhone app?
The Blackberry isn't dead yet. Although tech blogs and other news sites have given heavy coverage to arguably hotter smartphones like the iPhone, Android, and now Palm's new Pre, the Blackberry is still a staple phone across much of the corporate world. If you don't use a Blackberry or have moved on to something else, you may think that the phones are just boring devices - good for email, but not much else. You would be wrong.
Thomson Reuters is today launching the latest version of its Calais web service and open API, Calais 4.0. Calais is a toolkit of products that enables publishers to incorporate semantic functionality within their properties - enabling them to categorize content as people, places, companies, facts, events, and more. Calais 4.0 is perhaps the most significant version since the launch of Calais one year ago, because it enables publishers to connect to the Linked Data web standard that Sir Tim-Berners Lee and others in the Semantic Web community have been promoting over the past few years.
In November of last year, Six Apart announced a new community management tool, TypePad Connect, a service designed to give bloggers more insight and accessibility to the conversations taking place on their blogs - whether they used Six Apart products or not. Now, the community with access to TypePad Connect just got exponentially larger.
Social bookmarking sites - as many of us know - are a veritable treasure trove of information, especially when it comes to common tags like "howto" or "webdesign." But sometimes, clicking through all of those links can get a bit arduous. That's what makes playericious so great. It's designed to let you be lazy. Just a few keystrokes and you'll soon be perusing the best delicious and ma.gnolia have to offer.
A number of Google services just announced that they are about to shut down. The Google Video team announced that it will shut down uploads in a few months, while the Google Notebook team announced that it is stopping development (the service will continue to function, however). According to Danny Sullivan, Google is also closing Jaiku, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that was bought by Google before it even launched, but which has lingered in invite-only mode ever since. Google Catalog search, which made shopping catalogs searchable, will also be closed soon.
Tonight, The Wall Street Journal reports that the Knight Foundation has just awarded a total of $5 million to a number of local journalism projects in the U.S. These projects range from creating hyper-local online news sites, to building local Web portals, and establishing local news bureaus.
While the Knight Foundation's endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.
