The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

OrganizedWisdom Featured in BusinessWeek!

We're thrilled to be featured in BusinessWeek this week in an article titled: To Expand Your Business, Go Home. The subhead reads: Moving out of your brick and mortar offices and running your company soley online can cut expenses and boost productivity. Which is exactly what has happened in our experience as we build OrganizedWisdom.com.

We so excited because the piece highlights the way we are building our business, which we call Going Green Virtually.  I wrote a post about this (The 20 Benefits of Building A Green Start-up and Going Virtual) a couple of week's ago and we plan on sharing many more of our lessons learned and also some specific tips and advice based on our experience building OrganizedWisdom.

If you have advice or tips about your experience building a virtual business to get better results we hope you will share them with us in the comments! 

Podcast: The Value of Human Powered Search

Alt Search Engines Editor Charles Knight interviewed OrganizedWisdom and Kosmix yesterday for an enlightening discussion about the value of human powered search. It runs about 30 minutes long.

You can listen to the podcast here.

OrganizedWisdom Creates It's 10,000th WisdomCard

We're thrilled to announce that we recently achieved a major milestone at OrganizedWisdom:  Our amazing team of Health Guides and Reviewers have created more than 10,000 WisdomCards!

Organizing the Web's most useful health resources is a major undertaking, however our goal is simple...to provide the best search service in the world for health by hand-crafting WisdomCards that physicians and consumers will recommend to their family and friends. Each WisdomCard is carefully created and reviewed by our team of expert guides and there is a lot of love and care that goes into creating each one which is why we are so proud of this accomplishment. 

We originally expected it to take a year to achieve this goal, but the success of our growing Guide Program has helped us create more than 10,000 WisdomCards much faster.  We're already working on the next 10,000 most searched health topics, as well as making dramatic improvements and ongoing updates to our rapidly growing WisodmCard Library.

Thanks to everyone of our Guides and Reviewers for working so tirelessly, carefully, and passionately...here's look at our current Top 50 most popular WisdomCards:

1. Pictures of Infant Rashes
2. Exercise
3. Running
4. Diabetes (Type 1)
5. Breast Cancer
6. Ovarian Cysts
7. Lyme Disease
8. STD Pictures
9. Asthma
10. Stroke
11. Breast Calcification
12. Syphilis Rash Pictures
13. Heart Disease
14. Pregnancy
15. Yoga
16. Avandia
17. MRSA Pictures
18. Sexually Transmitted Diseases
19. Skin Rash Identification
20. AIDS
21. Melanoma
22. Depression
23. Skill-Related Fitness
24. Home Treatment for Sebaceous Cyst
25. Abnormal Reactions to Mosquito Bites
26. Applebees Restaurant Nutrition
27. Cramps During Early Pregnancy
28. Celebrities with Autistic Children
29. Pictures of Gout
30. Acne
31. Blood Type Diet
32. Photos of Skin Cancer
33. Bruised and Swollen Top of Foot
34. Rosiglitazone
35. Foods That Act As Diuretics
36. Pros and Cons of Universal Health Care
37. Causes of Swelling in Feet and Hands
38. Famous People Who Died of AIDS
39. Diabetes (Type 2)
40. Spina Bifida Pictures
41. Biliary Dyskinesia
42. Sun Poisoning Rash
43. How to Reduce Swelling in the Foot
44. Shingles Rash Pictures
45. Herpes
46. Physical Stages of Dying
47. ADHD
48. Odds of Miscarriage After 8 Weeks
49. Eczema Rash Pictures
50. Autism

OrganizedWisdom Video Interview Featured on CenterNetworks

Yesterday morning I had a fun time doing a video interview about OrganizedWisdom with Allen Stern of CenterNetworks.

The video runs about 15 minutes and some of the topics we covered include:

* What is OrganizedWisdom?
* What's a wisdom card and how many cards are there today?
* Are you creating content or just showing search results?
* Plagiarism issues - this was running wild in another human powered search engine
* Do you allow the public to contribute?
* How do you compare to NY-based Hakia's health search and iMedix?
* What's the business model -- this is actually very interesting - I discuss a variety of components to the business plan unlike some of the other human powered search engines that are looking at advertising as their only revenue avenue
* What's the team like?
* How does someone become a guide and what qualifications are required?

WisdomCards Get Footnotes and Citations to Enhance Credibility

Every week we ask our product team and Health Guides these questions:

How can we improve the quality of our service? And what can we do to make our content better, more useful, and more credible for our users?

And each week, we try to implement at least one innovation or improvement based on this feedback, the various suggestions from our users, and trends we glean from various usability tests and data analysis.

One area we've spent the most time working on is finding ways to improve the quality and credibility of each fact referenced on our WisdomCards.  Of course we already review each WisdomCard and link to useful and credible resources.  But we're making one major adjustment that we think adds a tremendous amount of credibility and transparency to the content on our WisdomCards: we've just unveiled (and our Guides are now hard at work at implementing across the OrganizedWisdom Library of over 10,000 WisdomCards) references, citations and footnotes to our WisdomCards.

This is a work in progress and will take some time to implement site wide, but you can see some examples on these WisdomCards:

• Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma
• Pick's Disease Treatment
• Vitamin C

As always, thanks for your feedback and if you have other suggestions for how we can keep improving the quality of our service please let us know.

Universal Internet Access

Howard Krein M.D., Ph.D

Chief Medical Officer

I just finished reading an article about “Wireless Philadelphia”, philadelphia’s quest for universal wifi to all its residents. The plans are to transform Philadelphia's neighborhoods by making high-speed internet access more available and affordable to all who live in the city.  The initiative is supposed to help people who are not online gain access with hardware, software, tech support/information, and broadband Internet service, so they can begin to use this technology to improve their educational, employment, health, and life opportunities.  Unfortunately, the project which has been in the making for over three years keep hitting snags.  This last snag was a big one…they ran out of money! Mayor Nutter (Philadelphia’s current Mayor) has pledged to try to revive this effort and I applaud him for this. Although the right to wifi is far from one of our god-given rights it can help improve countless lives through access to information. Being able to offer free or at least affordable high speed access to an entire city has huge implications on many levels.  This can lead to citywide changes from unemployment rates to increases in health and wellbeing. Certainly, one can’t argue that access to the internet can be not only empowering but life-changing.  Wouldn’t it be something if you could travel the entire country and never have to be without free internet access? Hopefully this won’t be as difficult to achieve as universal heathcare has been. It seems that although universal internet and universal healthcare are very different topics, the steps to successfully implementing either of these programs are the same.  First, we need to agree that this is a priority and set aside funds. Until the community (whether its a city or the country) agrees on the priority, chances are, it won't be accomplished.  So, Mayor Nutter, thanks for making this a priority! Now, what about universal healthcare for our city??