Genetics and Web 2.0

Bertalan Meskó

University of Debrecen

Faculty of Medicine

Why me?

My English medical blog ( http://scienceroll.com ) had 210,000 visitors in 5 months. More than 125 medical blogs link to me. I've been a host of Grand rounds, the weekly blog carnival of the best of the medical blogosphere.

My Hungarian medical blog ( http://mediq.blog.hu ) had 60,000 viewers in 2 months, more than 350 blogs link to me.

In Medgadget’s Weblog Awards , in the best new medical blog category, Scienceroll got special mention.

In the English Wikipedia , I'm the maintainer of the medicine portal, medicine wikiproject, medical collaboration of the week and I'm the creator and maintainer of the medical genetics wikiproject.

Brandon Keim, a well-known, freelance science and culture writer and news intern at Nature Medicine asked me to give him an interview about my experiences in Wikipedia and to talk about the future of online encyclopedias. ( News@Nature 13, 231 - 233 or Wikimedia; Nature Medicine; March of 2007 )

Why me?

An interview made by Nicholas Genes was published on Medscape journal . (Med Student Helping Shape Medicine on the 'Net)

Why have all of these things happened to me?

Because the topic is mostly uncovered and the importance of this field is exponentially growing:

In 2006, Time's Person of the Year was Yo u, the user of World Wide Web .

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a collection of second generation services which are based on communities.

It doesn't differ physically from the web itself, but has many advantages .

What are these advantages?

Saves time (RSS, Podcast, Videocast)

Makes it possible to share knowledge and experience (Community sites; Wikipedia)

Makes it easier to follow the changes of our field of interest (PubMed RSS, Blogs)

Web 1.0  Web 2.0 Google AdSense DoubleClick  Google Docs MicroSoft Word Tags - De.licio.us Favourites  Wikipedia Britannica Online  Content follows the user ( RSS , Podcast) User follows the content  Blogs, comments Static websites, homepages  Search ( Google ) Portal ( Yahoo )  Web 2.0 Web 1.0 

What kind of webtools could ease the work of physicians, researchers and users seeking medical information on the field of genetics?

Blog RSS Podcast, Videocast Wikis Medical search Content sharing sites Online communities Companies, E-book Online writing

Medical blogosphere

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

According to Technorati , there more than 75 million blogs in the world.

Subgroups: blogs of physicians, hospitals, nurses, medical students, health care lawyers (blawgers)

There are hundreds of medical blogs, and the number is still growing. The number of genetic blogs is about 50-100.

Why to deal with blogs?

Articles of blogs are not referenced in medical papers yet, but medical blogs have more and more readers:

Why to deal with blogs?

The number of blogs is duplicated every 5-6 months, so in September of 2007, every 50 th person in the world will have a blog

According to the surveys of HealthCare Vox and iHealthBeat :

93% of medical bloggers have been blogging less than 3 years, 52% have been blogging less than a year

8.9 million US adults reported reading health blogs on-line

British Medical Journal and Medscape features medical bloggers many times.

Unique genetic blogs

Genetics and Health : popular genetics

Sandwalk : a professor of biochemistry writing about genetics

Epigenetics : everything about epigenetics

Nature Genetics : the official blog called Free Association

The Personal Genome : genomics as a medical tool

RNA Bioinformatics : a professor of Iowa about bioinformatics

News on Genetics : a blog about the new result of genetics

The Genetic Genealogist :the use of genetics to study genealogy

DNA Direct Talk : your genes, your health, your choices

OMMBID Blog : provides a forum for geneticists, genetics researchers, educators, and students

Blog carnivals

But you can't run through all of these blogs day by day, so medical and genetic bloggers collect the best posts for you, the best of the weekly genetic blogosphere:

Grand rounds : the weekly rotating carnival of the best of the medical blogosphere

Gene Genie : a blog carnival on genes, clinical genetics and the news of genomics

Mendel's Garden : a blog carnival devoted to genetics

What is RSS ?

RSS = R eally S imple S yndication

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Programs known as feed readers or aggregators can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that they find.

What is RSS good for?

To follow the search results of PubMed

To follow medical journals, medical blogs

How to read it?

Via Bloglines.com , Netvibes.com or Google reader , web browsers

Via program: feedreader.com

An easy and comfortable method to follow the changes of our field of interest.

Create PubMed RSS to follow search results automatically

How to subscribe to a blog's RSS? Click on the Feed icon!

Copy the link of the feed

Insert it into your feedreader program, browser or online feedreader

And use it!

Track your favourite blogs, journals without wasting time, without visiting dozens of blogs or journals every day.

Let the information come to you!

Podcast and videocast

Podcast

PodCast: Po rtable broa dcast

A portable audio file (or video file: videocast) that you can listen to while working

Most of the medical journals maintain podcasts (and now more and more medical blogs do)

Odeo.com collects all the podcasts of genetic blogs.

Videocast

National Institute of Health VideoCasting

More than 50 genetic videocasts, including

Genome Analysis

Human Genome

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Why is it important?

4 million users

1.7 million articles

More than 200 languages

For many searches, the Wikipedia article is among the first results ( Google loves content )

Reliability of Wikipedia

Here, I listed 6 articles of the List of causes of death by rate and counted the number of references and external links in them. What I wanted to show is that Wikipedia is improving on the field of reliability (and never forget that Wikipedia is a work in progress ):

Genetics in Wikipedia

Category of genetics (several thousands of articles)

List of contributors:

@ Medical genetics wikiproject

@ Medicine wikiproject

Manual of style (medicine-related articles)

Guideline of the medical genetics wikiproject

Images of the genetics category from Wikimedia Commons

Medical search engines

Search engines (like Google , Yahoo ) don't select among sources, that's why many of the medical search results can't be relevant.

But medical search engines use peer-reviewed sources and sites selected by experts providing the most relevant and reliable medical information of the best quality.

Medical search engines

Healthline

Mammahealth

Medhunt

Google Health

OmniMedicalsearch : a metasearch engine for the medical search engines

Genetic Search Toolbox

Content sharing sites

Freely usable medical sources on the web:

Google Video : genetic video collection

Flickr : medical image collections

Clinical Cases : collection of cases

Online community sites

User driven social content websites. You can submit articles and others will read and rate your submission. So the community works as a screening system to feature the most important or most interesting medical articles.

Digg.com/Health and Science.reddit.com

Can laypeople determine properly a scientific article's scientific value? Probably not... What to do?

BioWizard : A Digg-like site created for physicians and researchers.

BioWizard users submit relevant, timely research articles they have found to be useful and interesting to the BioWizard site. Just perform your usual PubMed search on BioWizard and submit your favorite research. The articles you submit are then read by the rest of the community who promote articles they feel are deserving of recognition. The best articles in a research field are brought to the top page for all to read and discuss.

Biowizard.com

Tiromed.com : free social networking, resource portal for physicians and students of medicine. You can:

Find and share medical information

Build network with colleagues, physicians, peers

Blog RSS Podcast, Videocast Wikis Medical search Content sharing sites Online communities Companies , E-book Online writing

Companies

Organized Wisdom is a health-focused, social-networking site that enables consumers, physicians, healthcare professionals, and health organizations to collaborate on more than 6,500 health topics.

Sermo : physicians aggregate observations from their daily practice and then - rapidly and in large numbers - challenge or corroborate each others opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications, devices and treatments.

Social MD : is a new way to network with other physicians. Whether you are a medical student, resident, fellow or physician you will find that SocialMD helps you to meet and network with other medical professionals.

Revolution Health : your own health homepage

E-book

Electronically available, freely usable textbooks.

medicalstudent.com

avaxhome.ru

ebooksclub.org : 4000 medical books

gigapedia.org

Online collaboration

Google Docs és Spreadsheets is a free web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that keeps documents current and lets the people you choose update files from their own computers. You can, for example, coordinate your student group's homework assignments, access your family to-do list from work or home, or collaborate with remote colleagues on a new business plan.

Just like you could use your Word or Excel online.

You can save the results in Word, Excel or in pdf extensions.

A few words about open access

All works published in PLoS journals are open access, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Everything is immediately available online without cost to anyone, anywhere -to read, download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use- subject only to the condition that the original authorship is properly attributed. Copyright is retained by the author.