OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

The Power of Patients

I'm in Atlanta this weekend for the Lighthouse Lymphedema Network conference. (Look for updates from the conference on my personal blog.) This is a conference put on by patients, inviting health professionals, manufacturers, patients, families and other interested folks to get together and talk about a condition that is difficult to manage and often painful and embarrassing. Already I've met some terrific people and discovered some new products that may help me manage my own condition. I've also been talking about what we're doing with OrganizedWisdom Health -- making health search on the Internet faster, easier and better. People seem to like the idea!

This conference is an example of what people can do when they are empowered to gather information about their health and actively work to make things better for everyone. It's inspiring -- and it's one of the reasons we include blogs and message boards among our sources for our WisdomCards. (For example, check out our cards on Breast Cancer or Bursitis.) I know that as a patient, I learn best when I hear from both medical authorities and other people who have been through what I'm going through. That's why I'm here, and it should be a good weekend.

Malcom Gladwell: The next revolution is not going to come from a machine.

This week a bunch of bloggers started talking about the definition of Web 3.0, debating everything from the proposed definition, to announcing that it is non-sense to even be discussing the definition.

The definition of Web 3.0 doesn't matter much at all. What does matter are the results of continued innovation.

And we believe the result of continued innovation online means a new crop of human-powered and machine supported services designed to provide better information, improved quality, more relevancy...and ultimately a whole host of new opportunities for knowledge workers. 

Thanks to Web innovation, collaboration tools, and social media we are entering the age of Social Services.  And that is a good thing for us all.

That's because people + machines are more powerful than machines on their own. People know how to see things that machines can't and vice versa.  People know how to make judgments in a different way.  People know how to organize information using common sense, while machines have all sorts of other abilities like sorting through massive amounts of information quickly to find useful patterns.

One theme that we have been preaching since the inception of OrganizedWisdom is that much of the innovation that is happening today, and that will continue to happen, is not the result of new technologies alone, but rather the new service offerings that people start providing using these new technologies.  It's the People Powered Movement. 

Mechanical Turk is a great example.  And Wikipedia is perhaps one of the beset examples of this trend...a bunch of people working together with the power of the MediaWiki platform.  Seth Godin has written about the need for People Powered before, and most recently Jason Calacanis suggested the same in his definition of Web 3.0:

"Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform."

Perhaps Malcom Gladwell summed up the thought best in a recent interview:

"Google in a sense is a symbol of the solution to an old problem. We don't need more Googles; what we need is a way to prioritize and analyze and make sense of the information we have at our fingertips. And maybe those kinds of solutions aren't technological at all. I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine; it's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."

No matter the definition of Web 3.0, 3.1, 4.0 or whatever, the future of innovation is how we empower the power of people's wisdom with great technology.

BoogieJack Saves time using OrganizedWisdom Health

As we were perusing our log files seeing, we ran across people coming from this very interesting blog called BoogieJack that had a nice short review of OrganizedWisdom Health

He writes at the end of his post..."Among my minor maladies is tinnitus. I learned more from a half hour of reading the search results for that term than I learned in several hours of scouring the search engines a while back. I bookmarked it, you'll probably want to as well."

Thanks BoogieJack (it's sure is fun to write that word!)

Sites with spirit of Web 2.0 encouraging people to share thoughts on illnesses, doctors

The San Fransisco Chronicle has a nice round-up piece on some of the new Health 2.0 companies working to help patients.

We were happy to see OrganizedWisdom featured along with several other great companies.

Read the article, titled For these startups, patients are a virtue here.