Dolphins

Patient Gagging: Sign here before you're treated.

I wrote a post on this on Medical Spa MD, a blog I own, but since this crosses the bounds from medicine and straddles all of blogging, I've posted most of the original here:

Medical Spa MD, my blog for physicians running med spa and laser clinics, hosts anonymous comments. I made the decision to allow that after some careful thought when I first launched the site. (Of course, almost all comments on the web are anonymous.)

There are both benifits and drawbacks to anonynimity. With the number of cease and desist letters I've received I'm aware that not everyone is happy when they're pilloried in public by namless commenters. Here's a story from the AP on doctors who are asking patients to sign what amounts to a gag order befor they'll treat them.

The anonymous comment on the Web site RateMDs.com was unsparing: "Very unhelpful, arrogant," it said of a doctor. "Did not listen and cut me off, seemed much too happy to have power (and abuse it!) over suffering people." Such reviews are becoming more common as consumer ratings services like Zagat's and Angie's List expand beyond restaurants and plumbers to medical care, and some doctors are fighting back.

They're asking patients to agree to what amounts to a gag order that bars them from posting negative comments online.

So... where to come down? The right to criticize and protect yourself, or additional protections for individuals who may be the recipient of negative comments.

A number of companies; Sona, Solana, Dermacare, medical spa frachises and consultants, RealSelf.com, Cutera, Thermage, Lumenis... these companies have taken some heavy hits on Medspa MD from disgruntled docs. Would you want unhappy patient to have a high profile forum like this one that they could use to damage your reputation and business?

Googles Interest Based Advertising

Google has launched “interest-based advertising,” which will display ads based on the user’s previous searches and page views. Google’s experiment with behavioral targeting has also been done by Yahoo and others as a way of increasing ad revenue through a more granular focus on viewers, but has led to privacy concerns.

Google announced on March 11 that it was launching a beta version of what it terms “interest-based advertising,” a type of behavioral targeting that delivers ads to users based on their previous searches and page views.

Stumble Upon brings Big Traffic at Light Speed.

I wrote this Simple Curiosity post on 'Why Time Slows Down When Approaching the Speed of Light' a while ago. In fact it wa on the Simple Curiosity blog that I've closed and now host on this site.

Someone found that post and Stumbled it, leading to an extra 20,000 page views in the last 48 hours and the addition of 700 RSS readers. Shazam!

Of course, now I'll have to start writing Simple Curiosity? again to keep those RSS readers happy.

Technorati Tag Authority

There’s a fresh new opportunity from Technorat to create both powerful one-way links to your site and build your own reputation as the expert in your market.

Technorati has introduced new “tag pages” system, the main page:

There are two approaches to keep in mind when utilizing the new Technorati tag pages.

Firstly, you want your own blog posts to appear in the more popular tag pages (of course, they need to be on relevant tag pages as well - don’t pick irrelevant tags). There’s a comparison engine that can help you determine the most popular tags. For example, here’s “Internet marketing” compared with “seo.”

As you can see, SEO trends higher than interenet marketing. So, if you had a blog post relevant to both categories and were trying to decide which one to tag it with, SEO would be a great choice as it’s a more popular tag. You should use between 5-10 tags on your blog posts, so there’s plenty of room for several tags but, again, it’s important they’re relevant.

Secondly, and this is the fun announcement from Technorait - each tag page has a sort of “sponsor” who writes an introduction to the topic. In return, Technorati links to the authors blog! Take a peek at what this looks like:

These pages are, of course, new right now and there are TONS of them available for you on which to add your own description and link! Because you’ll only get links from and write descriptions for tag pages that are within your niche, these links from Technorati will be HIGHLY relevant as well - and we know Google loves that!

Technorati describes the opprotunity:

This is a unique opportunity for authors, brands, agencies, experts and content sites with some significant benefits. Your tag article will appear on Technorati.com with a writer credit. You will be seen as the definitive expert on a tag subject – by millions of readers. Your article can include links to useful references and sites, including your own, if relevant, as well as your own byline link. It’s also really easy to contribute: tag articles are only 2-3 paragraphs, between 100 and 200 words, and can live for years as evergreen content.

Aside from the Google love link you’ll receive, having a prominent space on your niche’s main Technorati tag pages will bring your own site and name brand recognition. Having written the tag article, you’re now the expert in the niche.

How to become a tag page author? You’ll need to join Blog Critics, and they do a manual review of your content. If you’re publishing MFA (made-for-Adsense) or other non-unique content, you’ll likely not be approved. This is the opportunity to showcase your best work. Once you’re a Blog Critics member, you’ll be able to author Technorati tag pages.

Move forward with this opportunity as quickly as possible, as the “keyword goldrush” is occuring right now - grab the best keywords for your niche before they’re all snapped up!

Via Crowd Mountain

Spoon Fed

Ben & Jerrys created the ice cream flavor “Yes Pecan!” for Obama.

They then asked people to fill in the blank for the following:

For George W. they created “___________________________”.

Here are some of their favorite responses:

- Grape Depression
- Abu Grape
- Cluster Fudge
- Nut’n Accomplished
- Iraqi Road
- Chock ‘n Awe
- WireTapioca
- Impeach Cobbler
- Guantanmallow
- imPeachmint
- Good Riddance You Lousy Motherfucker… Swirl
- Heck of a Job, Brownie!
- Neocon Politan
- RockyRoad to Fascism
- The Reese’s-cession
- Cookie D’oh!
- The Housing Crunch
- Nougalar Proliferation
- Death by Chocolate… and Torture
- Freedom Vanilla Ice Cream
- Chocolate Chip On My Shoulder
- “You’re Shitting In My Mouth And Calling It A” Sundae
- Credit Crunch
- Mission Pecanplished
- Country Pumpkin
- Chunky Monkey in Chief
- George Bush Doesn’t Care About Dark Chocolate
- WMDelicious
- Chocolate Chimp
- Bloody Sundae
- Caramel Preemptive Stripe
- I broke the law and am responsible for the deaths of thousands…with nuts

Risk Aversion

Andrew McAffe's Blog has his thoughts on how people value and avoid loss. His explanation was fascinating, and very insightful. He said that we need to stop thinking about consumers as highly rational evaluators of the old vs. the new products, lining up pros and cons of each in mental tables and then selecting the winner. Instead, we need to keep in mind three well-documented features of our cognitive 'equipment' for making evaluations.

• We make relative evaluations, not absolute ones. When I'm at a poker table deciding whether to call a bet, I don't think of what my total net worth will be if I win the hand vs. if I lose it. Instead, I think in relative terms -- whether I'll be 'up' or 'down.'

• Our reference point is the status quo. My poker table comparisons are made with respect to where I am at that point in time. "If I win this hand I'll be up $40; if I lose it I'll be down $10 compared to my current bankroll." It's only at the end of the night that my horizon broadens enough to see if I'm up or down for the whole game.

• We are loss averse. A $50 loss looms larger than a $50 gain. Loss aversion is virtually universal across people and contexts, and is not much affected by how much wealth one already has. Ample research has demonstrated that people find that a prospective loss of $x is about two to three times as painful as a prospective gain of $x is pleasurable.

Phishing scams explained for Mom.

Stanley Fish

"Don't fetishize the text."

Squarespace

Squarespace is the platform I try to build sites on if I can. It's fantastic as I say in my Squarespace vs Wordpress review.

There are some solutions that don't work as well on Squarespace, when you can't use a hosted solution for example, but if you're blogging and want fantastic functionality and ease instead of Wordpress backend-ugly, Squarespace is da bomb.

Squarespace has made some changes to their own site today and it's more than just a little improvement if you, as I do, hate to read light body copy on a black background.

We Live In Public at Sundance

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The best film I saw at Sundance this year was We Live In Public, winner of the Grand Jury Documentary Prize and a fantastic film. It was of special interest to me in dealing with how public all of our communication systems are. (Two women sitting next to me who were aghast to find out that Google serves up ads to you by scanning the actual contents of your email.)

Films that deal with technology usually aren't this good but Ondie Timoner and Interloper Films spent more than ten years filming, before finally discovering the story. Fantastic.

Creating massive community involvement: 11,000 Medical Spa comments.

User generated content.

If I hear that phrase one more time... I'll have heard it many, many times.

It seems that it's what guys think you want to hear for some reason when they're pitching a deal that would necessitate the creation of mongo content.

Of course user generated content has been around for a while and it is the foundation on which distributed networks are built upon. Distributed networks that attain market saturation become extremely valuable. (The telephone is a perfect example.)

Now you can go ahead and build some sort of platform, but getting people to generate content for you is not easy. People generally don't want to spend their time helping build out your site. In fact, building out content for your site is just below... we'll, it's below everything.

Usage is king, and evangelists, fanatics are key.

So how do you get users to create content and build value? There are a few tricks and some insight but there's a fair amount of common sense to. You've got to provide value that exceeds the opportunity cost for the end users of staying with their know behavior. See, simple.

Therer are lots of sites that are attempting to build community. I have a site that does pretty well in that it's; generating lots of unique content, has real fanatics and evangelists that extole it's virtues at every chance, provides real value, and is in a niche. Medical Spa MD hosts forums, classified ads, and physician training information for plastic surgeons, dermatologists and medical spas. The forums on the site are by far the most active physician community of any blog on cosmetic medicine. It's received over 100,000 monthly page views and 50,000+ unique monthly visitors with a large majority being not-tech-savvy doctors.

More to the point, there are more than 11,000 comments, many of them are more than 500 works long and are more ariadite than the posts.

Here's a list of some of Medical Spa MDs active comment threads with the comment count:

• Lumenis Active FX VS Reliant Fraxel SR1500 VS Cutera Pearl (177 comments)
  
• SCITON Forum (Exclusively for Sciton's users) (205 comments)
• What is the best laser for the following: Hair removal, non-ablative skin treatments, wrinkle reduction? (51 comments)
• Palomar Starlux 300 vs. Palomar Starlux500 (60 comments)
  
• Candela Gentle YAG Vs. Cutera Vantage (51 comments)
• Advice on LASER assistedlipolysis (27 comments)
• Advice for 4th-year medicalstudent? PLEASE! (28 comments)
• Can someone shed some light on the Titan by Cutera? (73 comments)
• Orion Laser Harmony (52 comments)
• Lumenis Malcontents (NOT HAPPY with Lumenis) (103 comments)
• Active  Deep Fx Users Group (38 comments)
• Fair esthetician pay (47 comments)
• Legislation about to affect all FL med spa's and MDs (41 comments)
• Who can legally perform laser hair removal? (46 comments)
• Fractional CO2 User Group -physicians only ( 144 comments)
• Cynosure Laser Users? Anyone? (63 comments)
• What's wrong with medical spa consultants (86 comments)
• A Dermatologist that's pissed ad FPs and OBGYNs (106 comments)
• Nothing brings out anger like Thermage

• Let's talkresults: C02 > Plasma > Erbium > Fractional C02 > Fractional Erbium > Pearl
  
• Palomar Starlux 500 vs. LumenisOne
• Cutera Limelight IPL

• American Laser Clinics: Inside ALC? (144 comments)
• American Laser Clinics Part 1: Armed guards & threats. (275 comments)
• Solana Medspas is out of business? (198 comments)
• And the Mother of all Post Discussions that's in a league all by itself: Dermacare Laser & Skin Care Clinics (1,151 comments. Yep)

Notice that last one? 1,151 comments and counting. That's buy-in.

Physicians are generally not technical, have severe time constraints, and are peculairly hesitant to disseminate information that could come back to haunt them at some time in the future. (Malpractice premiums of $100k a year will do that.)

But, it targets a niche that was not represented. Namely, information for doctors that doesn't come from the marketing and PR departments of technology companies. Previously, all the information available to doctors was provided by companies or advertisers whose revenue is paid by companies. Companies don't like any negative press so the information distribution channels were without any criticism or any meaningful content.

There are any number of ways to exploit current systems and take advantage of existing needs to create real communities of fanatics.

Human Nature

"Teutonic rainmakers poured water over nude girls. That never did produce rain, but they clung to the ritual. "

Social Media Usage: Technology clusters and social site membership

Read the research >

Social network site membership

One particularly popular type of social media that blurs interpersonal and mass media is the “social network site” (boyd and Ellison, 2007), or SNS. At the time of this survey’s administration, MySpace was the most popular Web site in the United States, claiming some 83 million total users (Metz, 2006) and 12 million unique visitors per day, as well as the most popular SNS (comScore.com, 2007). On SNSs, activities include sending of private messages, viewing of profiles, and leaving public comments. Boyd responds to this variety of activities by stated that privacy on these sites is not clearly delineated, and that, “social convergence occurs when disparate social contexts are collapsed into one.” Similarly, SNSs, particularly MySpace, also increasingly “collapse” other forms of mass media as they serve as venues and vehicles for online media. MySpace promotes music and video through placement on the site, and funding of original video series is an area of expansion for the company. In late 2007 they funded two series, the MySpace–created “Roomates” and the dramatic series “Quarterlife.” In the same year, MySpace musician and model Tila Tequila received her own series, “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” on MTV. SNSs are increasingly used as part of media campaigns with both traditional and other new “social technologies” (Li and Bernoff, 2008). Advertisements, as games, videos, or other presentations, are frequently deployed in embeddable widget form to speed their propagation online generally, and through SNS profiles specifically. Given the popularity of MySpace, and the new ways it is being integrated with advertising and video, it was included in analyses to determine what other technologies these users are likely to use.

vSpring 100

Each year vSpring Capital publishes a list of the 100 individuals who are most likely to lead a successful venture as CEO or CTO in the next 5-7 years in IT or Biotech industries. Nominees do not currently need to hold titles of CEO or CTO, need not have current involvement in a startup, should have ties to Utah, but are not required to be a Utah resident, and candidates and v100 members from last year are eligible for voting again this year.

To submit your nominations (yes, you can nominate yourself) go here.