Joseph A. Cerro

What is it about Twitter?

Mark Scrimshire put together a superb presentation about Twitter last week. Although I've embedded the SlideShare deck below, please do check out Mark's blog - lots of interesting thoughts and observations!

What Is It About Twitter?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: citih twitter)

A Call to Arms - Data Standards in Collaborative Research

I'll be moderating a presentation and panel discussion next month in Waltham, MA as part of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Life Sciences lecture series on "Technology And Life Sciences Collaboration."

Dr. Martin Leach, Head of Research and Biomarker IT at Merck Research Laboratories will present A Call to Arms - Data Standards in Collaborative Research. I've known Martin since my days at Bayer, when he was my counterpart at Curagen. He is an articulate and outspoken advocate for the collaborative benefits that are possible when data standards can be adopted and applied across industry and the academy. I anticipate that he will make a stirring call for biopharma groups working in areas like preclinical research and translational medicine to adopt some of the data standardization approaches that have been so successful on the clinic, such as CDISC, etc.

Immediately following Martin's presentation, we'll convene a panel to discuss what can and is being done toward the development and adoption of research data standards and asking 'if not, why not.' The panelists will include Dr. Chris Bouton, CEO of Entagen, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at Boston University and former Head of Integrative Biology at Pfizer, Dr. Jens Hoefkens, Managing Director of GeneData USA, Michele Pontinen, MBA, Life Sciences R&D Practice Leader at CapGemini, and Matthew Trunnell, Manager of Research Computing at the Broad Institute.

For up to date information about the presentation and panel discussion, or to register to attend, please visit http://lifesciences081202.eventbrite.com/.

Health 2.0 Conference (Oct '08) Twitter Stream

When I attended the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco last month, I learned that some of the participants planned to microblog the conference using twitter. Twitter is a tool that allows users to post short messages (140 characters or fewer) to the web and to share them easily with others. When multiple twitter users "follow" each other online, the effect is something like joining a near real time conversation.

Somewhere along the way, twitter users began adding a "#" symbol (pound sign or hash character) before key words in their messages, tagging the words as being somehow important or adding context. The neat thing about such "hashtags" is that twitter's search tool lets you find messages containing specific hashtags, even if you aren't "following" the person who originally posted the message.

This is where it gets interesting: if people agree on a hashtag for an event (like a conference), then it becomes easy to follow what is happening at that conference, even if you are not actually attending it. Further, collecting messages with a specific hashtag creates a record of an event, not so different from collecting a series of dispatches by a group of correspondents. Finally, if you are at a conference, following a hashtag thread can let you know about last minute changes, insider info, spontaneous get-togethers, or simply where to find the best beer within walking distance of the convention center.

At the Health 2.0 Conference, people settled on the #health2con and #health20con hashtags. Using these tags truly added to the conference experience, allowing people to connect and to converse with a wide range of participants whom they might not have met otherwise, and, best of all, providing a means to keep the conversation going beyond the conference.

The consolidated #health2con/#health20con search results are available at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23health20con+OR+%23health2con&rpp=100

Unfortunately, twitter's search engine only returns the last six months of results, so that link may not show the results from this past October's conference by next April or May. On the bright side, by then I'm sure that it will show the results from the next Health 2.0 Conference, to be held on April 22-23, 2009 in Boston!

Now, we just need to get the ball rolling for a hashtag for next month's Consumer Health World conference...

A Community-Driven Health Informatics Calendar

Mark Hawker has been on fire recently! His latest effort is a community-driven Health Informatics Calendar that anyone using an iCal-compatible calendar tool (Google Calendar, Apple iCal, etc.) can subscribe to. While there are other good calendars out there, most of them are company or organization focused, like the HIMSS calendar.

(Note: the calendar uses the London timezone by default, so adjust your perspective accordingly if you are based elsewhere.)

Update: Jen McCabe Gorman points out another good calendar, hosted at the Kaiser Network.

The Forgotten Health Tweeple

Mark Hawker got so much feedback about his earlier "Top 30 Health Tweeple" list that he has added twenty "Forgotten Health Tweeple" to the list.

Thanks again, Mark, for putting compiling the list.