I’m not surprised that Guy Kawasaki’s 10^th book is called Enchantment: How to Woo, Influence, and Persuade. It takes some chutzpah to assume near–zero knowledge of social media at a scholarly publishing conference but Kawasaki, a former “software evangelist” (I kid you not!) for Apple, pulls it off with an idiot’s guide to curation, tweeting, and why Google+ will ultimately succeed. more…

Tomorrow I’m running a workshop for medical students at Imperial College London on medical journalism, and I thought it essential to include something on using and enjoying social media. I imagined that I would find dozens of guides on the web, but to my surprise I couldn’t find anything satisfactory. And much of what I did find was negative, warning medical students about the dangers of using social media. I thought that a great shame and misguided when social media become more important every day, so I thought I’d put together my own tips—and it’s clear that ten is the right number for tips. more…

“I’m afraid I’m currently out of the office right now on the never-ending mission to restore world health—I am very interested in your message and will endeavour to reply to it as soon as I am back.” This rather immodest response to my request to sign up to a new soon-to-be launched on-line game (http://www.syrum-game.com) was signed by the lead character, Professor Syrum. Syrum will be a social game on Facebook which will allow participants to take control of their own pharmaceutical company. The aim is to equip and use a laboratory to discover new drugs, bringing them to market to improve global health, or as the learned professor puts it—“the health of the world is at stake and you are the only one that can save us.”

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Social media seems to be the modern equivalent of the stocks. The main objective of the stocks was public humiliation. Nowadays, any member of the public can use social media to highlight grievances they might have against companies, organisations, and institutions and post them for all to see and comment on. more…

A compelling piece in the Economist argues that social media are returning news to the “more vibrant, freewheeling, and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era” and that newspapers will prove to have been a historical aberration. The same, I think, will be true of scientific journals. more…

The NHS and technology have had a quixotic sort of relationship recently. A current source of collective angst for the NHS is what to do about social networking? The behemoth of this new genre in communication is Facebook. Facebook and its micro blogging counterpart, Twitter, have even been implicated as major contributors to the recent so-called “Arab Spring” in the Middle East. In the US, the American Medical Association appears to be quite keen stating that “participating in social networking can support physicians’ personal expression, foster collegiality, and camaraderie within the profession,” as well as providing an “opportunity to widely disseminate public health messages and other health communications.”  In contrast, in the UK, most hospitals have a total ban on using Facebook at work. more…

We recently had another visit from Barack Obama to the San Francisco Bay area. However, rather than sampling the delights of the city, the President drove south down route 101 to Palo Alto and the headquarters of Facebook.  The President was the guest of honor at a “town hall event” moderated by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. A Facebook “town hall event,” in reality, meant streaming video over Facebook Live and White House websites simultaneously with a potential audience of more than 500 million people. The idea of Facebook Live is to let users ask questions directly to guests. In the past similar events have included Tony Blair, and ex-US President George W Bush. more…

The NHS is in love with the airline industry. The idea of checklists before operations has really caught on, and increasingly ex-airline people are being placed in advisory roles for a variety of NHS organizations. Hospitals are especially envious of the ability of the airlines to develop and use technology that allows hundreds of random individuals to be safely transferred over thousands of miles with the minimum of fuss and at relatively specific times. more…

Forget complementary therapies, the big question is can engineering succeed where traditional medicine has failed? Anyone following the online technology bible “TechCrunch” might be persuaded by this idea. Here in the US and on the West Coast in particular, the belief is growing that the combination of money and mathematical and engineering brilliance (and also increasingly youth), has the potential to solve many of human kind’s ills. Only the other day, one start-up company in Stanford (Healthtap) secured early funding to the tune of $2.5 million to create an “expert health companion.” Their blurb describes what they are trying to do as “help define the new field of ‘interactive health’” — the sector that is moving consumer health information to new platforms, like smartphones and tablets, to provide portability and immediate access to actionable information. The company plans to “integrate personalisation, game dynamics, and social networking to increase our engagement with our health and well-being.”  more…

Last Sunday it seemed like the whole of Silicon Valley stopped work to watch the Oscars (on-line of course) otherwise known as the 83rd Academy Awards. Overall, the impression was that it was a pretty limp affair with only one F-word, robotic presenters, and bland acceptance speeches. The botoxed fashionistas were particularly scathing about the stars’ couture on the red carpet and once the ceremony was over interest rapidly switched to following the dalliances of Charlie Sheen and his eclectic “friends.”  However, the most interesting and hilarious comments during the Oscars were on the live stream from Twitter. Comments came fast and furious throughout the ceremony and have continued ever since. Isn’t modern technology wonderful? more…