Some viral videos

You have probably seen the 'Machine is us/ing us' video that shows the movement from text to hypertext to today's social networks - if not, you can find the latest version on YouTube at >>> There are plenty of other versions around too, and it was produced by Michael Wesch and his 'Digital Ethnography' group at Kansas State University, USA.

It has spun off many similar videos, the most recent one I have come across is called 'A vision of students today' - it is by Wesch and his students and is also on YouTube >>>. Interestingly, it has provoked widely differing reactions from colleagues, from "sad and left me not knowing what to do to reach these individuals" to "Pretty powerful stuff". Decide for yourself - you might also be interested in the transcription and discussion at http://www.mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

This week must be Vienna

Peter Murray, and a number of other members of CHIRAD and BCS Health Informatics Forum, wil be in Vienna, Austria this week for the 'World of health IT' event (www.worldofhealthit.org).

I will be blogging the event, although probably mainly on a couple of other blogs, so keep an ee on them - or you can check the 'uCru6' widget that aggregates posts from our various blogs. As BCS are funding the trip, many of the posts will be on the 'Release Zero' blog.

More later in the week; this post from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam.

IMIA Web 2.0 taskforce

Peter Murray is co-leading the new IMIA (International Medical Informatics Association - www.imia.org) Web 2.0 Exploratory Taskforce.

See the post of Informaticopia for more information ( >>> ) or go directly to the Taskforce portal - http://www.differance-engine.net/imia20/

South Africa and London

CHIRAD members Graham Wright and John Bryant are teaching this week in Mthatha, South Africa, on the MSc in Health Informatics (>>>) (>>>).

Today (17 September), Peter Murray is attending the KIDMM 'Metaknowledge mashup' day at BCS HQ in London. He will be blogging 'live' throughout the day - posts can be found on the BCS blogs site at his 'Release Zero' blog - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlog.6

Portable apps

The PortableApps.com Suite™ looks good >>>. It is "a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, ... all preconfigured to work portably".

It has several versions, and can be installed to portables devices (such as USB/flash drives):
* Base: 0.7MB (download), 1MB (installed)
* Lite: 30.4MB (download), ~105MB (installed)
* Standard: 89.5MB (download), ~260MB (installed)

And it is all under Free / Open Source (Mozilla apps: MPL, Others: GPL) Licenses.

We'll post a review here when we've played with it a bit.

After medinfo2007

All too quickly, medinfo2007 has been and gone. Blogging from the event proved to be more challenging than we had expected - Internet access in Australia is nowhere near as cheap and readily available as we have come to expect in other places we have travelled to, or here in the UK.

CHIRAD members did contribute various blog posts, which can be found on Informaticopia and the hi-blogs.info blog. If anyone has additional comments, please feel free to add them to the existing posts. If you have photos you would like to share, then contact us about how to do this (ie, don't just email them to us).

The great trek to medinfo2007

The great trek to medinfo2007 has started. Some CHIRAD members set off on their journeys today, and others will be setting off over the next week or so.

We hope to blog here, and elsewhere, about the event and share experiences with those not fortunate enough to be able to get to medinfo2007. More later.

See www.medinfo2007.org