The economy might be about to tank, but why should the children have to suffer? If you are going to give to charity this year (and you should, every one of you), we highly recommend giving to DonorsChoose. Each donation funds a classroom project or equipment for teachers who too often have to fund supplies out of their own meager paychecks. This year we are once again participating in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge, which raised a total of $420,000 in 2007.

You can give as much as you want (the minimum donation is $10). Last year, I bought a digital camera for a classroom in Illinois, and got hand-written thank-you notes from each student. It really brought home how a few hundred dollars can make a big difference to a roomful of students. But to encourage some serious donations, we decided to make it a little more interesting this year. The top three donors who give at least $1,000 each will receive an All Events pass from TechCrunch. This pass will be good for two tickets to any MeetUp or conference that TechCrunch helps to put on between November 1, 2008 and November 1, 2009. All of them, including TechCrunch50 and the Crunchies. (A single ticket for TechCrunch50 alone cost $2,995 this year).

Not only that, but as an extra bonus, whoever donates the most will also get a one-hour pitch session with angel investor Ron Conway, who has generously agreed to donate his time for this worthy cause. All proceeds go to DonorsChoose, a tax-deductible charity. We’ll even throw in five TechCrunch t-shirts as runner-up prizes (they are very rare, you know).

We’ve picked some classroom projects worth looking at, or you can find your own. As long as you donate via this TechCrunch page or through the widget below, it will count towards our total and put you in te running for the tickets and the Ron Conway session. Also, if you are an American Express cardholder, vote here to give DonorsChoose a chance at an extra $1.5 million donation.

Also see:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/01/want-a-free-pass-to-all-techcrunch-events-for-a-year-or-a-pitch-session-with-ron-conway-fund-a-donorschoose-classroom-project/

http://learntoduck.com/micah/dont-give-to-education

Erick Schonfeld takes a look at OpenSocial on TechCrunch:

Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. It will soon reach 500 million, as four more social networks and services prepare to launch by the end of of September.

Google’s Joe Kraus gave me an update today on OpenSocial’s progress. He wouldn’t say which partners would launch next, but by the size of that pink bar in the graph above, one of them is relatively large—about the same size as Orkut. (My guess is that it will be either Bebo or Six Apart). He also mentioned some partners, such as imeem, launched without ever contacting Google (thanks to Apache Shindig) and that at this point only 10 percent of the engineers hashing out the OpenSocial specifications are from Google.

So how many OpenSocial apps are actually being used? There are about 4,500 different apps so far, which have been installed more than 150 million times.

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks: Profile Information (user data), Friends Information (social graph), and Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff). It will be interesting to see how the adoption rate of OpenSocial increases over the second half of 2008 as it has made incredible progress in the first half. Thoughts?

From the blog:

First and most obviously, the new Home screen is included, along with a ton of UI changes for 1.0.

Some new applications are included: an Alarm Clock, Calculator, Camera, Music player, Picture viewer, and Messaging (for SMS/MMS conversations.)

Several new development tools were added, such as a graphical preview for XML layouts for users of Eclipse, and a tool for constructing 9-patch images.

Since we've got a new Home screen application now, we thought the now-obsolete version from the M5 early-look SDK might be helpful to developers, so its source is included as a sample.

A number of new APIs are fleshed out and improved, and others are now close to their final forms for 1.0.

Tons of bugs were fixed, of course. (If you had problems with the MediaPlayer, try it now!)

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld has picked up the story and adds:

This SDK is still not the 1.0 release. (It is version 0.9). There are still bugs and some features that had to be removed because of security reasons, such as support for GTalk and Bluetooth. (That won’t do). But those should return once the bugs are fixed, hopefully by the time the 1.0 version is available in September.

This release has been long overdue, but now that it is out may begin to appease many of the mobile app developers out there who have been frustrated by the general lack of access to the latest SDK. But with T-Mobile’s Android phone only two or three months away, it doesn’t give them a lot of time to create jaw-dropping apps. The new SDK can be downloaded here. (And screen shots can be found at Hello Android).

It appears that Android is getting closer and closer by the day. Let's see what happens in the coming weeks before we get too excited. Thoughts?

The information is based on a list composed by the World Information Access project and interestingly shows that the number of incidents went from five arrests in 2003 to 35 last year.

As one would imagine, most of those arrests take place in countries with oppressive regimes, but not exclusively as Erick's list shows. Countries include Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran as well as Canada, France, Greece, and the U.S. (Josh Wolf being a famous example; he spent almost a year in jail for not cooperating with a grand jury).

Erick details some examples:

Charles Leblanc (Canada; June, 2006): "For taking pictures at a conference for his blog."

Josh Wolf (USA; August, 2006): "For videotaping a burning police car."

Hu Jia (China; December, 2007): "For posting his vocal critiques of human rights abuses and environmental degradation in China and calling the Olympics a ‘human rights disaster.'"

Reza Valizadeh (Iran; November, 2007): "For revealing Iranian president's overpriced dogs that his security team uses."

Nay Phone Latt (Burma; January, 2008): "For posting pictures of monks and people demonstrating on the streets."

Copied from Erick's post

Unfortunately, being arrested has not been the harshest punishment for blogging. TechCrunch has previously detailed a Chinese blogger who was beaten to death for blogging.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has a great story today about Facebook and how fast the Web site is growing at an incredible rate worldwide. The growth numbers presented by Schonfeld in this posting are very impressive, given the sites existing size.

From TechCrunch:

According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.

Much of these huge growth numbers come from the fact that Facebook had hardly no presence in many of these regions until recently when it started its major push to translate the site to other languages. A year ago, it had only one million uniques a month in all of Latin America, three million in the Middle East and Africa, and four million in all of Asia Pacific. When you look at it that way, 10,555 percent growth isn’t as amazing as the raw numbers would suggest. And within these regions, it still has a lot of work to do. For instance, it is floundering in Japan.

I was never a big Facebook fan until I was introduced to the Web site a few months ago by a friend who is a Facebook nut! MySpace and Facebook are clearly the two leaders in this fight but it will be interesting to see how the sites grow in the next year to two years. Facebook has recently updated their site and it has been getting mixed reviews from what I have heard and read.

From the New York Times:

Facebook rolled out a major redesign of its social networking site late Sunday that features a cleaner interface that links feed technology with user forums. Company officials said the updated site will give users more control and ownership over their profiles.

But many who follow Facebook pointed out that there is more behind Facebook's facelift than its stated aim to simplify and clean up the design of its user profiles. The new version, which is now in limited use, will be rolled out gradually to Facebook's 80 million users in the "coming days," Facebook said.

The redesign, for example, integrates feed technology and the Facebook Wall, a forum for users and their friends to post comments, photos, video and content from third party applications. In addition, users will have the option of previewing third party applications before adding them to their profile or granting it access to their information.

Sarah Perez, a blogger at Read Write Web, noted that the redesign coincides with the move into the job market by many of the users who flocked to Facebook when the site launched in 2004 as a closed network just for college students.

"Cleaning up a Facebook profile as well as ditching a slew of time-wasting applications is almost like a coming-of-age ritual now," Perez noted. "As the college kids move into the real world, the social network needs to reflect their changing needs in order to stay relevant while still appealing to the next generation of users." She said Facebook is looking to convince the so-called Gen Y workforce "that their set of social media tools can be the new way to get things done. It helps when profiles aren't filled with pointless, time-wasting apps that don't just fill your screen but also spam you and your friends with their notifications."

I still prefer MySpace to Facebook. I believe that the personalization ability that you have on MySpace is great and I feel that there are more opportunity's to express yourself on MySpace. Facebook has come a long way, but I don't feel that they're quite there yet. I also want it stated that I am not a  fan of the Facebook redesign. But, I am only one person in a global audience of millions. So, I propose this question. Who do you like best: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster or Orkut? Thoughts?

There were no venture-backed IPOs in the second quarter, and M&A deals are down. The last time there were no VC-backed IPOs in a quarter was in 1978. The liquidity drought for venture-backed startups is so bleak that the National Venture Capital Association is calling it a “crisis.” Last quarter there were only 5 IPOs that brought in a piddling $283 million. That compares to 43 IPOs during the first half of 2007 that brought in $6.3 billion.

Click here to read the full article on Techcrunch.

The cry out of Erick made me laugh a bit. Let's face it. It's a Tech Elite's problem. Yes, I consider myself part of that, and probably most of the readers of this blog post too ;-). If anything the current web 2.0 trend is fragmentation. There are thousands of social networking sites out there, each fighting a battle to get users. There are a whole lot of services that let you interact, publish, follow or be followed. There are aggregating sites that aggregate it all for you. There are aggregators that aggregate all the content from the sites that already aggregate content for you. And if that wasn't enough we now need to take it away from the browser and move each of these services into tiny little desktop applications. I can already predict the next wave in desktop application development. Someone is bound to get the idea to integrate Twhirl and all those other desktop applications into one big aggregator on the desktop. A Netvibes or iGoogle, but right there on the desktop instead of on a portal. And after that, who knows ;-)

Tech people, including myself, seem to be running away with all these different capabilities. Every time TechCrunch "breaks the news" for yet another web 2.0 service or desktop application people jump on it. Within minutes I see Twitter conversations that talk about the new application. People run around providing the developers with suggestions on how to improve the service.  It's called user feedback I believe. The problem with it is that the "user" in this case is a tech person. Which is fine if that is the target audience. But if you want to become big, if you want to be the next Google or Facebook, then you will have to remember that any non-tech consumer out there will not have the same desires as us techies do. How many people do you know outside your tech community that want to have 25 desktop applications live, running Firefox alongside with 10 tabs open, twittering 100 times a day, reading and commenting articles on Friendfeed, writing a blog post about it, starting riots to get traffic going, AND still have a normal day job and a life after that? I don't know anyone that fancies that kind of life. It is the life of the tech hero. We need to be out there, be there first. We are all affraid of not being there when it happens.

The cure for it? Not web 3.0, I certainly hope not. The receipe is quite simple (isn't it always), but the execution much harder. Let go. Let me repeat that. Just let it go. I see Twitter, Friendfeed, and all these other sites as rivers of information, anekdotes, posts, friends. I tap in whenever I feel like it, join the conversation. But I leave when I need to get back to real life. I know the river won't dry out. There will always be a next scoop, another funy remark, a great blog post. Life doens't stop simply because I choose not to be drwoning myself into this cyber river of information. I don't need 20.000 followers, nor do I want to follow 20.000.

If anything, web 3.0 should be about the user, about user value, about letting the Internet evolve around you, instead of around some destination site or walled garden. Web 3.0 should set us free, letting the important things come to us, instead of us having to go to the important things. It's about freedom of data. And yes, noise reduction or filtering will be nice. But that isn't really what web 3.0 should be about. Until it is here I'll be dreaming of a user centric web.

Wow, I just received the final program of the NextWeb Conference. And Erick Schonfeld will kick it off with the following topic:

Let's start with the end: Can Internet make us immortal?

Of course it can, Erick. Just go to www.respectance.com and you will see proof that there is life afterwards. As long as the memories linger on, we will be present. So save those memories and share them with the world. As a matter of fact, I just helped you to stay alive online. Playing God, sort of.

The first is by Erick Schonfeld, which talks about  how the US users of facebook has leveled off.
 
Erick predicts that the US usage of Facebook has leveled off because of "friend spam".  This could very well be.  I know personally that my Facebook usage has decreased with becoming bored with the applications that has made Facebook popular.  They were a novelty when I first joined, however like many things people get bored.

Another post, this one by Robert Scoble,  talks about what I has just said.  Boredom.  Also, there has been many people being kicked off of facebook because of dumb reasons.  Scoble talks about a guy in France that was kicked off of facebook for simply messaging his friends.  Now I don't know if that's all the guy was doing but still.

In a post by Adam Ostrow, Facebook's usage in Europe is growing very fast.
 
This could be just because Facebook is just getting caught on in Europe.  So this bags the question.  Will Facebook level off in Europe as well?  Who knows.  There are many things that different cultures embrace that other cultures do not.  The asian community has usually more technologically advanced gadgets than other continents, and then when we finally have it in North America, China/Japan/and Korea already have better gadgets.

So.  Do you think that Facebook will be a thing of the past here in North America? Or globally?

--Jerry 

Reuters report about Dr. Howard Stark, a physician with a unique practice. In the same article, it shows a photograph of a smiling man in front of the computer. And the reason for the smile?

Stark has moved most of his practice, based in Washington, onto the Internet and he couldn't be happier. Since he started his Web-based service two years ago, he has received 14,000 e-mails.

And yet, he feels more like an old-fashioned family doctor in a small town than a modern, harried physician.

"That's 14,000 phone calls that we did not have to answer and that patients did not have to make," Stark said.

He does not charge for answering an e-mail. "You have to come in one time a year for an annual exam," Stark said.

Dr. Stark's is another example of this big "office move" or "expansion." The inclusion of media in medicine or for his take, his medical practice. Another foot forward, another example of this next page, it is interactive. Very much like Dr. Jay Parkinson in Brooklyn, New York? Could be.

What of questions about personal service?

He also gets updates on patients' personal lives.

"People say how impersonal e-mail is. No way. It is so personal because I can hear what is going on with the kids," Stark said in an interview at his otherwise ordinary office.

"It keeps me a lot closer to what is going on with my patients," he added.

He gets a few laughs too.

The rest is free -- prescription refills, quick questions about medication, even questions about unusual stings.

"What do I get? A picture of the scorpion that bit the patient in Belize," Stark laughed. "I said, 'it would have been better to send me a picture of your leg.'"

Is it the potential avenue, potentially a solution to the variety of growing issues of health care?

Health experts, the U.S. government, labor unions, employers and average citizens all agree the U.S. health care system badly needs improvement.

So what inspired him to shift his practice this way? Airlines!

The idea came to him while booking a flight.

"I was sitting here and making a seat assignment to go to Miami. And I said, 'why is it I can make a seat assignment four months in advance and my patients can't book a half-hour appointment?'" he said.

How sweet it is...?

"I feel like I have taken 21st century medicine back to being more like the old-fashioned physician who knows how your family is doing."

Exciting stuff continue to unfold. Technology is being explored. Information and communication enhanced. More and more are willing to adapt and explore the many many possibilities of the current realm of the web.

Stark contacted a couple of friends with Internet experience and they designed DoctorsOnTheWeb (http://doctorsontheweb.net/), a site that lets any doctor do what he is doing. So far, three other doctors have signed up to use the site, he said.

More importantly, what of patient's privacy concerns?

The system works like a bank's Web site. To avoid putting confidential information in e-mails, patients work on a secure server. If Stark wants to contact them, they get an e-mail merely directing them to pick up a message at the password-protected site.

It allows patients to ask about their health as issues arise, instead of waiting for the annual exam. "If you have any questions, it's so nice to shoot an e-mail," Stark said.

One of the many points of concern about this new wave of practice, what of the quality of his care for his patients?

Stark stresses that he does not make medical decisions based on an e-mail.

Read the rest of this news here. A must. There is some kick there about the thorny insurance again. Then again, as I have supposed above that this is quite similar if not the same model as Jay Parkinson's. Thus, a possible solution to the uninsured as well.

ZocDoc

Speaking of instant doctor's appointments, here is some fun news from Mashable.

ZocDoc is an online appointment tool for searching for doctors and scheduling appointments as easily as making a restaurant reservation for dinner online. The company launched early last autumn in the New York city area, focusing initially on dentists.

Nearly 6 months later, ZocDoc has about 50 dentists that have signed on board to try out this free scheduling service, and is now ready to roll out its tools for doctors as well, beginning Feb 14th. When I first spoke to Cyrus Massoumi and Dr. Oliver Kharraz prior to the launch about its upcoming expansion, and was anxious to hear about how the company had grown in these past few months. “It’s all been organic,” Massoumi said. “Doctors are approaching us, asking when we’ll be ready to add them to our site.”

iMedix

And, our dessert for today, yes, another networking site. But wait, networking for those seeking medical information. Please welcome the newly launched, iMedix.

Here's Techcrunch's account of this nifty new social networking site.

iMedix is a social search engine focussed on healthcare that has raised $2 million from angel investors. When you type in a search term, an auto-completed list of health and medical terms pops down to help guide your search. Type in “toe,” and it suggests “wound of toenail,” “tingling toe” “broken toe,” “blue toes,” “absence of toe,” and “hammer toe,” among others. Along the side column are profiles of iMedix members who may be interested in health topics related to the search. In this case, “sport injuries.” If the iMedix members are online, you can start a chat with them. If they are not online, you can send them an e-mail.

This ends today's blog of epic proportions. ;-)

Related
—Media In Medicine: What of the Insurance Companies & Other Issues?
—"How Web 2.0 is Changing Medicine", an addendum
—Media In Medicine: More Than Mending The Broken
—2.0 in Medicine and Definitely Beyond

Upcoming—Media In Medicine: I Love Film.

Tim Arango pegged his Times story around BigThink's investors (former Treasury Secretary and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, among others), and painted a pretty Ivory Tower, highfalutin picture of the venture. Erick Schonfeld goes more than 800 words in his evenhanded look on TechCrunch, making fair criticisms of the site's interface, and comparing it with FORA.tv. (Disclosure -- I know Don Baer, one of FORA.tv's board members.)

Kudos to BigThink founder Peter Hopkins on the launch, and the great coverage.

But the more interesting story, the one I would have liked to see in the Times or TechCrunch, is the trend story. BigThink is an example of a company carving out a quality-content business in a post-YouTube, post-Digg, lewd-and-loopy-win world. Whether or not BigThink's model is exactly the right one, or if they'll execute, remains to be seen. But they're trying to do something interesting, and I can't help but applaud the effort.

Anyone who's spent any time around Brijit will understand why I like BigThink conceptually:

They're embracing unique, smart content with an eye toward making it accessible to a mainstream audience. They don't seem to be dumbing it down.

They're taking a hybrid approach to content creation. They seem to be committing to high quality by employing internal editors and house-produced segments, while at the same time seeking to tap into all benefits of community-generated content and the wisdom of crowds.

They're looking at big long-form ideas from trusted sources and boiling them down for a short-form world.

I sense a trend...

Pg 22 (“Software that writes itself”)  “It feels archaic, frankly, to have all of this secrecy, the patents and NDAs,” he [Jonathan Edwards, a research fellow at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab] says of Intentional [Software], which has thus far released few technical details.  “The only way you have an influence today is by giving it away.”

Check out these articles online “The FaceBook Economy” by Lindsay Blakely  and Michael V. Copeland,  – about applications running rampant on the No. 2 social network;  

and the fascinating “3D Printing for the Masses,”by Chris Morrison;

or buy the pub and read:

Joel Stein’s (hilarious) “Two Buck Chuck takes a bite out of Napa: Fred Franzia [iconoclastic] has a big mouth and an even bigger winemaking empire -- one that's scaring the bejeezus out of his elitist rivals.”   

“Making Beautiful Startups Together,” by Pia Chatterjee, which covers founding couples of Six Apart,  Flickr,  and Bebo;

Michael Kaplan’s “Job interview brainteasers: Google, Microsoft, and eBay want engineers who can think on their feet. How do they find them? With these job interview brainteasers.” 

A really good read, even before you get to the cover story, Erick Schonfeld’s and Chris Morrison’s:  “The Next Disruptors.”