The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

Why Ning And The Commoditization of Social Networking Matters

Not long ago companies like Blogger (now owned by Google), Sixapart, and Wordpress forever changed the Web by making it easy and virtually free for anyone to create their own blog and become an online publisher.  After only a few years blog search engine Technorati is tracking over 70,000,000 blogs!

Today, at least two new companies, Ning and KickApps, are evolving the Web even more by making it just as easy for anyone to quickly and inexpensively (FREE!) create their own social network on any topic.

Social networking has been around as long as blogging, but only within the last year have these new turn-key software solutions made it plug-n-play simple for anyone (or any company) to create their own networking communities.  For years, people have been creating Yahoo! Groups, and leveraging the power of MySpace and now Facebook.  But people have little control in these walled gardens and they make it difficult to customize their services.  (Yes, even with Facebook Apps).

Ning and KickApps on the other hand have leveled the playing field yet again and as a result the social network has been commoditized.  In fact, in the past few months tens of thousands of people have launched their own social networks.  Ning alone now boasts over 80,000 communities created since they opened up their platform a few months ago with more than 5,500 new social networks created in the past 10 days!

With the commoditization of social networking we are about to see a lot more niche communities launch in the coming weeks/months/years.  The question is, how will this impact all those companies who are spending a lot of money and resources to build their own proprietary/closed online networks?

Web 2.0 continues to make it easy for anyone to publish.  Now it's just as easy to create your own network, open or closed.  You don't need a budget.  You don't need servers.  And you don't need any technical ability. It truly is a flat world for social networking.

This means that the power of social networking is open to your local lyme disease foundation, or the regional network of nurse practitioners. You can create a temporary community for a friend's fund raiser, or compete with the big social networking platforms to create an environment more tailored to the needs of your group. You are now in control and can create any social network you want.

This is going to have a major impact on many companies in the Health 2.0 space as well as the Web overall.  Over the past 18 months we have seen the launch of dozens of niche social networking communities in the health sector focusing on everything from MS and ALS (PatientsLikeMe.com), to more comprehensive health communities like DailyStrength.org.  We've also seen millions of dollars be invested in companies like Eons.com focusing on the boomer market.  And over the coming months we'll see many more new companies launch to help bring new solutions to healthcare.

When OrganizedWisdom first launched we billed ourselves as the "first social network for health" with a mission of organizing all the world's best health wisdom.  We quickly realized that building a walled garden community was not the solution and over the past few months we dramatically evolved our strategy for a relaunch this fall (we're in private alpha right now). If you pay attention to OrganizedWisdom.com, you may have noticed that several months ago we stopped building new technology on the live site.  That's because we learned some valuable lessons early and quickly saw that we needed to make big changes to improve our service, stay competitive long-term, and tap into the power of a world where people are sharing such great wisdom across thousands of blogs and now social networks, just like they have in online forums for so many years.  The changes we are making are not merely technological.  They are about adding value to a world where everyone has access to great technology.

For companies like ours, and many others working hard to bring better solutions to people to help manage their health, there is still a significant need for better information, services, solutions.  The opportunity remains to continue to innovate, focus on quality, and add value in a commoditized technology world.

Is Today's Internet Killing Our Culture? Why Human Intermediaries Are Essential In A Web 2.0 World.

For anyone interested in social media, the concept of the Wisdom of Crowds, or the meaning of a flat world, we highly recommend watching this presentation by author Andrew Keen as part of the Authors@Google series.  Mr. Keen discusses his book "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture" and he makes a compelling argument for the value of intermediaries in a Web 2.0 world.

Over the past year as we've been building OrganizedWisdom to help guide people to safe, inspirational and credible health information, we've been thinking a lot about this issue and figuring out the best way to tap into the power of people sharing their own stories and recommendations. 

The biggest issue has been with figuring out the best way to organize all of the great wisdom being shared across the web, and determining the role our editors, guides and medical reviewers in helping curate all of this information. 

These are some of the questions we been dealing with (and continue to deal with) since the beginning: What rules need to be established to guide people to quality information? How do we protect people from spam?  What role should editors play?  What types of content should be considered user-generated? Is a doctor-video on YouTube user-generated? Should we include links to wisdom that are also promoting a specific product or service? And so on...

Mr. Keen makes some important statements in this presentation about the essential need for intermediaries in a world where everyone has essentially acquired their own "printing press". 

To paraphrase, he says in the Web 2.0 world, everyone is able to publish themselves. You don't have to have programming skills to be a blogger.  You don't need to have gone to recording school to produce a video.  Web 2.0 makes it very simple to create and distribute because it does away with the middleman.  And according to many who evangelize the value of Web 2.0, the middleman is bad, corrupt. Gatekeepers are bad.

But, Mr. Keen argues Web 2.0 is not a viable economy because we need middlemen.  We need the expert. Whether in marketing, creativity, or content creation, the middleman helps discover the best talent and polishes their work.  The intermediaries are the core players in any media system whether Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. If we do away with the intermediaries we are undermining media because we are undermining talent.  He warns the reality is that talent is scarce.  The core value of the ecosystem in media is finding and distributing this talent.  The ecosystem is HUMAN.  The only way of discovering and polishing the best of the best is a human function. Not an algorithm.

There is a lot we agree with in Mr. Keen's thinking.  That is not to say we are not proponents of everyone having the ability to publish, and create, and share.  We just agree that there is great value in helping organize, structure, and lend credibility to the best of what the crowds are creating.

Because this flattened media is more open to corruption and lends itself to illegitimate characters gaming the system to their advantage, we are seeing the proliferation of clutter, spam, and junk mixed in with all of the greatness, inspiration and wisdom.  How do we know what information is great/trustworthy/credible in a Web 2.0 world being infiltrated by people who are using the same virtues of open media to sell products, manipulate or satiate their ego? 

Mr. Keen makes a defense of a media with formal, official, and transparent gatekeepers because he believes "Web 2.0 is too easy to game.  To easy to play around with.  Too many sites are too easy to fix."

"The problem with this flattened world," says Mr. Keen, "is when you do away with formal gatekeepers, the problem with web 2.0 media is it is increasingly becoming one long commercial break. Increasingly hard to distinguish between paid content and free content.   The whole thing becomes one long advert.   It is becoming more difficult to distinguish between content and advertising."

We are seeing many of these issues being worked out as communities like Wikipedia institute more guidelines, editorial controls and moderation.  But there is clearly a lot more to be done in order to weed out the junk. Social media and collaboration are incredibly powerful, but as the Web expands it is becoming more clear that humans are an essential ingredient in helping monitor, organize and guide us to the very best wisdom of crowds.

How To Judge The Credibility of Health Sites - 10 Tips To Help Weed Out SPAM Sites

As we've been blogging about quite a bit recently(here, here, and here), SPAM sites (and the practice of Spandexing) are cluttering up the Web and making it more difficult for people to find the very best health information available.

Now that most people go online to search for health information, it goes without saying that people need access to credible sites from trustworthy sources.

The good news is there are now so many great resources for safe and useful health information. There are also thousands of bloggers and health communities where people are sharing helpful advice, recommendations, and inspirational stories.

The bad news, is that the bad guys (spammers and black-hat search engine optimizers) are creating their own blogs, infiltrating forums, and developing scraper sites to try and make money from advertising or sell products. All of this added clutter, coupled with the sophistication of many spammers, is making it harder to distinguish between quality sources and sites just trying to sell something.

Don't get us wrong.  Just because a Web site is trying to sell a health product or make money from advertising doesn't mean it is a spam site. In fact some of the best health information sites available are now created and paid for from educational grants from pharmaceutical companies. And virtually all of the top health portals feature extensive advertising.

But the reality is there are now tens of thousands of fake blogs, scraper sites, marketing scams and other unsavory sites created for the sole purpose of making money -- not for trying to provide people safe and credible information so they can make better health decisions.

So what is spamdexing anyway?

According to wikipedia, spamdexing is any of various methods to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. It is a form of search engine optimization.

It can often be very hard for search engines to distinguish the difference between a good Web site, and one that uses optimized content, meta-tags, and other techniques to try and rank well alongside the top ranked sites. Since many search engines are not doing a good enough job at weeding out all of the spam these days (just do any health search on Technorati or Google Blog Search and you'll quickly see what we mean), it is essential that anyone searching for health information pay attention to the source of information and learn how to spot a spam site.

Here are 10 Tips to Help You Judge The Credibility of A Health Site:

1) Is the source of the health information clearly identified?
If it isn't easy to find out who authored the content, post, or site, then skip it.  Any credible health information provider will clearly label who created the content.  For evidence-based health information ("expert" content), some of the trusted sources are Healthwise, A.D.A.M., National Cancer Institute, Multum, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, etc. You can find this content on sites like WebMD, Revolution Health, Yahoo! Health, and Health Central to name just a few credible health portals.

For blogs and user-created content, often the most trustworthy information comes from people who are patient advocates or health bloggers who make their contact information and a short bio available to clearly identify who they are, their motivations, and expertise.  We search for wisdom from people who share these details because it adds an additional level of trust, credibility and even inspiration for the readers.

2) Does the information seem reasonable and is it useful?
Common sense is your best bet to spotting spam sites. While computers can't always spot the junk sites, humans often can.  If the information seems too good to be true than it probably is.  Whenever in doubt, check for other sources and print out the information to ask your doctor questions.

3) Does the site feature a credibility seal from HON or have accreditation from URAC?
Health on the Net and URAC only offer seals to trusted health Web sites that follow strict guidelines and policies.  The challenge here is that most blogs do not have these seals. But many health forums, support groups, and community sites do.

4) Does the site clearly state its privacy policy?
If you are using a health information site and are asked to share personal information make sure to read the privacy policy. To be safe only use sites that feature privacy policy seals from TrustE or BBB.

5) Does the site link to or feature other credible sources of health information?
Lots of spam sites create what are known as link farms and multiple blogs on similar topics.  They all simply link back and forth to one another.  A massive mess of clutter.  Be careful here, however, as some scraper sites will literally copy word for word some of the information from credible sources and mix in their marketing messages alongside the content they stole from legitimate sources.

6) Does the site have good Google Rank or Authority on Technorati?
Google ranks sites on a scale of zero to ten. Sites that are too new will often have a Google Rank of zero. Technorati has a feature that shows the Authority of a blog by indicating the number of other sites that link to it.  These tools can be useful, but by no means foolproof.

7) Is the site trying to sell something or is it featuring too much advertising?
Often the easiest way to distinguish a useful health site from a spam site is to check if the site has an agenda.  Is it trying to get you to buy a particular product incessantly? Does it seem like the advertising messages are mixed in too closely with the information? Is there a company or product sponsoring the site? Does the sales message overpower the educational message? The best health sites, blogs and communities have the goal of trying to provide useful information to help people, not just sell a product.

8) Are their editorial and community guidelines posted?
This won't help much with blogs, but the best health sites and communities make clear their editorial guidelines, terms of service, and advertising policies.  If the health site looks like it doesn't have any of this information than it could be a fly-by night operation or a scraper site.

9) Is the information dated or have a time stamp?
Most blogs do this automatically, but health sites should make it easy for people to see when the information was most recently updated.

10) Check the web address.
Often times, spam sites will use URL redirects to automatically take you from one health site to another site.  If the domain name looks like a weird address with lots of numbers and dashes, it should give you pause.

There are many other ways to judge the credibility and quality of health information. We'd love your suggestions and ideas to add to our list.
 

New Survey: Web Is By Far Most Trusted Resource For Researching Drug and Ailment Info

According to a recent study by Prospectiv, the vast majority of online consumers say the web is overwhelmingly their most trusted and reliable resource for researching ailment and drug information, beating out broadcast media and magazines by a large margin.

Some 75% of 800 consumers responding to Prospectiv’s 2007 Pharmaceutical Marketing CPI poll said they view the internet as their most trusted resource, followed by broadcast media (15%) and magazines (10%).

Other findings from the survey:

• Consumers who conduct online ailment and drug research largely favor general health websites (54%) and specific ailment-focused sites (37%) over pharmaceutical company sites (4%).
• The majority (40%) of respondents said that they had conducted online research only two times or less during the past six months; 33% reported research frequency of at least once-a-month, followed by every other month (27%).
• When asked what would pique their interest in specific drug treatments for their ailments, the majority cited drug samples (55%), followed by e-newsletters to help them learn more (35%) and coupons (10%) as the top incentives.
• Consumers’ views on pharmaceutical television ads:
  • 83% surveyed expressed concerns that pharmaceutical ads on television can be confusing and misleading.
  • 89% agreed with the sentiment expressed by some government organizations and consumer advocacy groups that television drug treatment advertisements need to be more closely regulated.
  • 72% of respondents also said that there were too many drug treatment advertisements on television.

“What’s particularly interesting is the low number of consumers who rely on pharmaceutical sites for information, indicating that brand managers need to find new ways to pique consumer interest and engage them,” said Jere Doyle, President and CEO of Prospectiv.

“Educational e-newsletters, health-focused websites and micro-sites focused on specific ailments have proved very effective in this regard. The first step toward initiating these online resources is for brand managers to build an in-house database of self-profiled consumers who have expressed an interest in learning more about their treatment options.”

About the study: Prospectiv conducted the 2007 Pharmaceutical Marketing CPI Poll online, gathering responses from 800 consumers across the United States. The survey was conducted from June 20-June 22, 2007. Prospectiv provides online customer acquisition solutions and is the owner of the online properties Healthier.com and Eversave.com.

SPAM Sites Infecting Revolution Health And Kosmix

SPAM sites are becoming a major problem in the health sector and something needs to be done to weed out the garbage that's out there.

You would think that you could trust major health portals like Revolution Health and vertical search engines like Kosmix that focus on health as one of their main areas of expertise to protect people from SPAM. But sadly they're not doing a good enough job and spammers are taking over their search results and tarnishing their credibility.

Here are two examples of searches I just did on Revolution Health which features Kosmix searches after their own search results. To illustrate the issue rather blatantly I did one search on the drug Viagra.  And a second search on the topic of Hair Loss. You'll see how the results are filled with SPAM sites:
 

No matter what health topic you are searching on, any credible health site should make it their mission to only deliver high quality results.  It's bad enough these black hat spammers even exist.  It's even worse when health sites with so much promise like Revolution Health let them infest their site.

Medicine 2.0: Send your best posts here

OrganizedWisdom is hosting the Aug. 5 edition of the Medicine 2.0 blog carnival, and I'm looking for your best posts about the intersection of Web 2.0 tools and services with the world of health care. Bertalan Mesko is the founder of this carnival, and deserves mention for his work in gathering and exploring this emerging world.

What's a blog carnival, you ask? It's a single post which links to several other posts on different blogs, pulling them all together under a theme. For blog readers, carnivals are a good way to get connected with other blogs on topics that interest you. For bloggers, they're a good way to get exposure to new audiences, and build connections with others in your field.

It's not just blog posts, either -- if you've seen a great YouTube video, an interesting podcast or slideshow, or some other piece of Web content that illuminates an aspect of "Medicine 2.0", I'm interested in including it! E-mail me at pat@organizedwisdom.com or use the submission form on the Medicine 2.0 site to let me know what should be included.

Vertical Search Engines Take on Google and Gain Traction

When you are looking for a specific type of information where do you start your search?

Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that two-thirds of Americans researching health-related topics online started with a general search-engine and most people use Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

But are search trends beginning to change?

Recently there has been a lot of progress made in vertical search -- search engines that focus on delivering more relevant results on specific topic categories. As people grow familiar with these new sites this will likely start to take away market share from today's major search players.

Vertical search for health is perhaps one of the most active categories and it is only heating up. According to an article in yesterday's Economist, "one promising area for vertical sites is health-related search, which provides a microcosm of the threats and opportunities facing specialists. At stake are the online advertising budgets of the pharmaceutical and health-care giants, which are expected to spend $1.4 billion on online advertising in America alone next year, up from $625m in 2005. According to Jupiter, a consultancy, nearly a quarter of American internet users say the web is essential to taking care of their health."

Google has made it well known that it considers the health sector to be incredibly important, although it remains unclear what their actual plans are.  We've also seen recent acquisitions of vertical search sites like MedStory and Healia, and momentum is picking up for health search companies like Kosmix and Healthline.

From the Economist: "Health is a field where consumers do seem prepared to seek out specialist sites that provide more relevant results. According to a new study from Jupiter, to be published on July 16th, 65% of health-search users believe that relevance is the most important criterion when deciding whether to click on a particular result; only 16% rate the trustworthiness of the source as most important. In short, relevance is king, says Monique Levy of Jupiter, which suggests that a vertical search-engine that successfully pairs a broad target market with a complicated topic can do well."

We agree with the The Economist's assessment and are curious about how Jupiter's new findings will impact the sector.  Relevance is king when it comes to health.  Our sense, however, is that the issue of credibility and trustworthiness will only continue to be more important.  Particularly as health related SPAM sites and sales and marketing clutter make it more difficult to sort through the best information. 

Will vertical search engines be the solution?  There is a lot of work to be done and room to grow in vertical search. There is clearly a huge opportunity to help people find better health information, and their are a lot of great companies building technologies to help solve the challenge.  We'll certainly be doing our part to help organize the world's best health wisdom.

Alert Your Blog Readers: OrganizedWisdom Is Back At It Again!

That's right. After a lull the past few months in our online participation, we're ramping up the frequency of our blogging again.  It's been 9 months since we publicly announced OrganizedWisdom, and boy have we learned a lot. We're also evolving a lot and growing a lot.

We figure why not share with you everything we have learned (good and bad!) about the Health 2.0 space, the pharma industry, building our company, and the biggest challenges and opportunities facing our industry today.

The reason we have been kind of quiet lately is because we've had our heads down, cranking away at building something very special.  We just haven't had time to blog because we've been so busy building.  Not that we have anymore time now, because we are still incredibly busy, but we feel we just have too much to say and we're about to burst.  No sacred cows either.  We want to push the discussion forward in the so-called Health 2.0 sector in a big way so hang on!

We won't be publicly previewing (or re-launching) the Alpha of this new service until August, but we're really excited about it.  We've learned so much from your great feedback over the past year which continues to help us build something incredible.

More to come...

Seth Godin And Squidoo Finally Respond To SPAM Problems

Seth Godin (prolific blogger, author and the founder of Squidoo) finally responded to the problems his company has been having with SPAM web sites.

An email sent out today from Seth Godin and the Squidoo team to thousands of their members says "Last week, a few dozen spammers exploited Squidoo and drove the rest of the Web crazy. They spammed tens of thousands of blogs and built thousands of worthless lenses, violating our Terms of Service with reckless abandon."

The reality is, spammers and search engine optimizers have been using Squidoo for over a year to help spam the Web.  It's disconcerting that Seth (the author of Permission Marketing and once vocal opponent to SPAM) would minimize the seriousness of the problem by passing this issue off as the work of a few bad apples.  In our experience using Squidoo to search for quality health information over the past year, it often seemed as though nearly every lens was questionable at best.  So much so, we finally stopped using the site.

So according to today's email and this post on the Squid Blog, here's what they have done to try and win back their credibility and fight SPAM on the Web: we've eliminated the tools that bad actors used to damage the rest of us. We've also added a squadron of people who hand review lenses, and we’ve made it easier for you (and anyone else) to report spam.

Is this too little too late?  We'll give Godin and Squidoo the benefit of the doubt for now, but we're still not using Squidoo as a resource to find helpful health wisdom.  They would have to delete ALL of the SPAM lenses on their site for us to feel comfortable using their service again.  Hopefully their squadron of people will do that soon.

First SPAM Tried To Take Over Email. Now SPAM Sites Are Invading The Web And Hurting Our Health.

Anyone with an email account has sadly had to learn to deal with email SPAM messages infesting their in box.  Each year the amount of SPAM, or Junk Mail, continues to rise.  But for the most part, we've learned to deal with these unwanted messages.  New software and filters are helping and people have become much more savvy these days about how to distinguish between legitimate and phony email.

But a more corrosive threat is starting to take over the Web: SPAM Sites, optimized by so-called "Black Hat" search engine optimizers, are gaming search engines like Google by building fake web sites and blogs.  They are spamdexing the Web. And many of them are targeting health search terms.

This is a particularly dangerous trend now that 8 out of 10 people are searching the Web to find health information.  That's because when you do a search on any of the major search engines that pride themselves on indexing the Web (ALL OF IT), chances are you will have to wade through lots of Web sites to find what you actually want.  It's the nature of the best with so many Web sites today, with millions more being added all of the time, and new software that makes it easy for anyone to create a site in seconds.  But it's also because many of the results being returned are junk, SPAM, or just trying to sell something.

It's demoralizing enough to see that there are 18,800,000 results when I search for hair loss on Google. (As if having to search for hair loss wasn't bad enough!).  But it is not helpful that so many of the results are returning links to Web sites created for the purpose of getting clicks or selling a product. What's more concerning is all this SPAM makes health seekers wonder: How do I know which sites/links I can trust?  Which ones are credible?  And which ones have been created by spammers.

Perhaps no topics get spammed more on the Web than searches related to sex and health.  There are now so many fake and phony health related Web sites it can be hard for anyone to find quality Web sites or know if they should trust the information from the site they are on. 

All this clutter and SPAM is creating an erosion of credibility. This is a real challenge to the rest of the legitimate and credible Web sites working so hard to offer legitimate content, quality resources and valuable services.  The good news is that there are also so many great health Web sites, and often times these legitimate sites will rank well on the first few listings for any given search query. The bad news is it is becoming increasingly difficult to know who the good guys are.

Squidoo Gets Banned
Thankfully there are continued attempts by companies like Google to tweak their process and algorithms to ban and block these types of Web sites.  For example, just this week there have been reports that Google is finally blocking Squidoo lenses from its search listings because so many of the pages on the site are created by spammers and search engine optimizers. (Here is one of thousands of examples on Squidoo).

If the news about Google is true, then this is a step in the right direction. But can technology really solve this problem alone?   With so many spammers and black hatters out there, can technology really protect us? Or are other approaches needed to help protect the Web from SPAM and guide us to quality content again. Are there collaborative solutions to help combat this challenge?

We'll be writing a lot more about this SPAM issue as much more progress needs to be made to protect the Web, especially from spam sites that target health topics.  In my next post I'll be writing some lessons learned about How To Spot A Spam Site.

Kids Search for Health Info Online As Much as Adults, But for Different Reasons

Numerous studies and reports over the past few years have made it clear that the majority of people now use the Internet to search for health information.

But would you guess that Gen Yers (18 to 26) and Gen Xers (27 to 40) are now searching for health information online as much as Boomers and Seniors?

That's what the results from a 2006 Forrester Research survey titled How Different Generations Use Online Health Research show.

While different generations all seem to be using the Internet to find health information, what's interesting is the different types of information each age group is really using looking for.

Even though 84% of consumers said they have researched a health-related topic online in the past 12 months, the reason for researching health information online and the way consumers conduct their online research varies by age group significantly.

Here are some examples:

76% of Seniors (adults 62 and older) use the Internet to research medical conditions related to their own personal health, while only 19% of seniors research health conditions online out of curiosity, and fewer than 10% conduct online health research for academic, scientific, or professional reasons.

 

Gen Yers (18 to 26 year olds) were also most likely to research specific medical conditions online related to their own personal health, but 31% of this segment said they conduct online medical research out of curiosity and another 21% said they conduct online medical research for professional, scientific or academic reasons.

Here is another enlightening trend from the survey:

The Internet is the preferred source to learn about health topics for younger consumers, but it decreases with age. The survey found that 61% of Gen Yers say the Internet is their top source for health information, compared with 55% of younger baby boomers and 44% of seniors. 

The survey also found that Gen Yers are the most likely to research health information online when their physician suggests it, while older boomers were the most likely to go online to confirm what a physician or health care professional has told them.

It will be very interesting to track this data over time as each generation ages and see how these generational paradigm shifts will impact today's health care services online and off.

Health 2.0 Conference update

Matthew at The Health Care Blog has a quick update on the Health 2.0 conference in September.

There are already well over 100 attendees including lots of people from across the worlds of technology, providers, plans, pharma and finance. If you're planning on attending and haven't signed up yet, you may want to act quickly to reserve your spot.

OrganizedWisdom's own Unity Stoakes will be there, appearing on a panel on "Social Media for Patients."

A brave new Life

Have you tried Second Life? This rather bewildering online world is powered by some very strong software, and as the name implies, once you get into it, it can be addictive. It also extends the power of Internet health information into a realm previously inhabited by gamers. Big guns of health -- from the American Cancer Society to the Centers for Disease Control -- have built their own SL presences.

So what's it all about? I first tried Second Life a year or so ago, and had a wonderful time creating an "avatar" (an image that represents "me" in SL). This part of the experience is great -- I made one that looks a great deal like me in the the real world (or First Life, as it's called in SL). If you've always wanted to be a knockout blonde or a cat-eyed ninja, you can do that, too.

Once you learn how to move around, the choices are almost overwhelming unless you sign up for a paid account and devote yourself to building your own "land." Puzzled by the array of choices and motivated by the fact that I do actually have a "first life," I let my account languish unused for several months. Little did I know! During that time, the possibilities have exploded for turning SL into more than a game or glorified chat room.

Second Lifers have held events including their own Relay for Life and a  health fairs. There are health-related photo exhibits and information displays. Here are a few of the coolest health-related places in Second Life (if you have SL software installed, the links will "teleport" you to those places):

• Ann Myers Medical Center: A real-life doctor in the United Kingdom has named this medical center after her mother. The idea is to explore ways to train medical students online. (Also see the AMMC blog.)
• HealthInfo Island: Contains information from a number of different health providers, including a free three-month trial of Reuters Health and an in-world gateway to do PubMed searches. Most recently, this location was host to a seminar on "Self-Esteem and Empowerment." (Blog: infoisland.org)
• The Gene Pool: Interactive genetic education including quizzes, animations, even the chance to get a T-shirt for your avatar, decorated with the markings of your favorite chromosome.

For those of you who haven't experienced Second Life, you'll probably need a fast connection and a semi-recent computer. Here's an introduction to get you started.

If you're not ready to start exploring, but want to know what it looks like, check out this video.

What are you doing in Second Life? E-mail me at pat@organizedwisdom.com. I'll share the best ideas in this newsletter.