The Media Equation: Call the Doctor
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The controversy over the drug Avandia demonstrates how the web seems better-suited to Paris Hilton than patient safety.
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Government to convene new thinktank to confront rapid pace of media change.
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Dr. Jerome Kassirer served as editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine for eight years during the 1990s. During that time, he says, doctors&#39; conflicts of interest became an increasingly evident problem.
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Scalpels and damaged doctors at 10 paces: an interesting duel of medical shows is emerging for the second half of the television season.
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Doc: "A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver." I think so too because: 1. The idea is so compelling and 2. It's so easy to implement. Thanks so much to Doc Searls for writing a great evangelical piece about the power of rivers. The stream is turning into a current, and soon really will be a river.  It&#185;s so weird to see rivers show up in Facebook, and Twitter is just a big river of all the people you&#185;re following. The idea is actually a descendent of the teletype terminals that used to be in the movies (and for all I know in actual newsrooms). The news would be printed on scrolls of paper, and when a new story would come in it would push all the older stories onto the floor. You could catch up on the news by scrolling back through the news. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn did it. We&#185;ll all be doing it soon enough. And it really helps to get other people singing the song, esp from within the hallowed halls of Harvard. The more attention we get focused on it, the more other developers will tune in. And what may not be so clear from the narrative is that this project got its start from a meeting I had with some technical people at the Times last week in NY. Like most organizations, it's not of one mind, there are people who are scared of what comes next but there are others who know that the Times has to change. By opening up their internal data to me, all kinds of interesting stuff can happen. We've been here before. The Times are the unsung heroes of RSS, without them it never would have solidified, with the publishing industry falling in behind the Times. It was this consensus that created critical mass for RSS 2.0 in 2002 and 2003. I really hope some of this stuff feeds back into the Times support of RSS. And as you have seen, there are now lots of new opportunities in user interface for news. This is what I do, when I'm in my "flow" -- we're there now again, with a new toy to build and then play with, every day.  Betsy Devine: "Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I&#185;ve known him." Phil Windley: "With more sources, who are themselves continuously updating, the keyword river could be as dynamic as you&#185;d want it to be."
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I noted yesterday that there seems to be some media fanfare surrounding Amazon's launch of a digital book tablet. It occurred to me that the markets surrounding media such as books, music and movies bear more than a passing resemblance to financial markets, and as such, perhaps they were amenable to a similar method of analysis. Being the owner of a sizable collection of paper books, this led me to consider the drawbacks one faces when Digital Rights Management restrictions are put in place.
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Why is it that when a doctor weighs in on the medical malpractice crisis [&quot;Dispelling Malpractice Myths,&quot; op-ed, Nov. 14], the solution never includes giving the public access to the National Practitioner
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Jim Posner sent me a link yesterday to an MP3 of a conference call between the press and two members of the Clinton campaign. It's really illuminating.  There are controversies the press isn't reporting, esp betw the Clinton campaign and NBC. Will there be a debate on Feb 26 and will CNN host it or MSNBC? There's some doubt, but you can't see it when you watch the broadcasts.  I'd love to subscribe to a feed of these conference calls, but we only happened to stumble upon this one. This morning on MSNBC they were talking about a conference call with Hillary Clinton, they said she sounded tired. I'd like to hear that for myself.  There's a difference in 2008, the campaign is not just being covered by the professional media, the people are doing it too. Even if we don't have our people on the calls, I'd still like to hear them.  So, if you have an idea how we could catch a stream of these, please post a comment. Thanks. PS: I archived the MP3 in case the link above goes bad.
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By Dolbeck, Andrew  The media sector has been seeing a fair amount of merger and acquisitions activity lately. Traditional print and broadcast media firms, struggling to compete with new online and mobile media outlets, have been targeted by private equity buyers.
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Doctors try to balance a patient's trust with new technology.
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There's a mini-debate going on about whether podcasting is a success or worth it, or whatever, I'm not sure exactly what the issue is, but it's framed this way --> if you can't get advertisers to hitch a ride on your podcast then podcasting is not worth much if anything.  I'm having a slow Friday so far, it's cloudy and chilly here in the Bay Area, we're in the January doldrums, so I thought maybe I could liven things up a bit by saying both sides of this argument are full of shit wrong. Let me explain. My phone doesn't have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast. Meanwhile... There's another mini-debate about bloggers playing pranks at CES. The Gizmodo guys ran around with some gadgets that turn TV sets off. At CES is this a big deal because much of what goes on there is TV. They were being assholes, interfering with people's ability to do their jobs and make a living. As a result bloggers get a bad rep.  The problem is that they're not bloggers, they're reporters and they work for a company that's not a blog, it's a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.  A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it's really hard to distinguish what you're doing from what professionals who don't use the web (are there any left?) do. Same with podcasting. I do a podcast from time to time because I want to say something. Whether I can run an ad on my podcast means nothing to me because I would never do it. And if I went crazy and let someone put an ad on there, it would only be to reciprocate for them having hosted the podcast, as a way of paying for the podcast itself (I'm contemplating doing exactly that right now so I had to include the disclaimer). I would never burden my podcasting with the task of supporting me. It's not why I podcast. We keep having this argument. Amateurism is good and there's lots of it. Professional writers and broadcasters probably have a place, I don't know, it's not my problem. But let's be clear blogging and podcasting exist independent of a professional's ability to eek out a living using the tools of blogging and podcasting.  Now I'm going to try to get some work done.  See also: Podcasting News, Mashable.
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Generally, Bad Language is against awards shows. The TelePrompTer puffery and please-buy/see-my-latest-CD/DVD appearances are nauseating at best. But it's our job to report on all things pop culture. So we watch. And we watch. And we fall asleep. Then we wake up and watch again.
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Digital media is the future. Here's one way to cash in.
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Hand-held devices help settle disputes. (Look it up!)
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Google buys a mapquest of its own. Also: Sharp takes us to the future of television in 3-D & hellip;.  PayPal finds a way to make amends for mistakes & hellip;. and more.
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Intensive-care doctors monitor patients from miles away. Also: Vioxx might be responsible for more deaths than thought.... New network in southern India gives government a big boost.... and more.
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A new service from BlogTalkRadio... Call their special phone number: 646-200-0000. It records the call. When you're done it creates an RSS 2.0 feed with an enclosure that's an MP3 of the call.  The address of the feed is a function of the phone number you called from. I just called in a podcast from my Nokia N95, which they added to this feed: http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/8583429663  That's all there is to it! No registration. They have a web page for it, but it's completely unnecessary.  It's the new application of RSS that I wrote about on Saturday. It's brilliant because of it's so simple. Some people think innovation in technology is about how hard it was to implement, or how long it took, or how complex it is, or convoluted. They see innovation as wizardry. I see it differently. I'm impressed by the ratio of functionality to complexity. I like that number to be as big as possible, because the less complex it is, the fewer moving parts, the less likely it is to break, and the easier it will be for others to build on the idea. Hats off to the BTR guys, they've come up with something truly useful that's also very simple.  Could it be simpler? I don't see how.