Information can really be beautiful if it is presented and referenced properly. There is a huge dataset of H1N1 related information visualized in a perfect way on one of my favourite blogs. An excerpt:

Check the whole image here and also the resources of the data.

I’ve recently come across quite an interesting medical innovation on BoingBoing. It could help millions of people suffering from COPD, flu, cystic fibrosis or asthma.

The Lung Flute is a simple device that uses sound waves to vibrate wads of mucus in your chest cavity until they rip apart and become more easily cough-up-able. (For better or for worse, the ultimate “results” of using the Flute are not shown in the above video.) Handy, certainly. But why, you may be wondering, would such a thing end up on Popular Science’s list of The Best Innovations of 2009? Easy. It’s because you and your common cold are not the primary audience for a Lung Flute concerto.

Kevin, MD has recently shared a video of Better Health’s Val Jones who is a fellow blogger of mine on Better Health Network, and who gave a presentation at the e-Patient Connections 2009 Conference. She used limericks to tell the stories of two e-patients. What is a limerick? Here is an example:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

In space that is quite economical,

But the good ones I’ve seen

So seldom are clean,

And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

• ePatient2009: Voice of the Patient. (SixUntilMe): Kerri Morrone Sparling has recently talked at an epatient conference.

• An Interview of @EndreJofoldi of HealthMash (Phil Baumann)

• FDA regulations for e-marketing of Drugs

• First Keas DiabetesMine Health Plan Goes Live (!) on D-Blog Day (Diabetes Mine)

Today, I’ve got butterflies in my stomach, which usually only happens when I sit in the back seat of a moving vehicle. That’s not because it’s D-Blog day today, either, although I want to start out by sending lots of love to all my fellow diabetes bloggers, and you wonderful people who read our words and interact with us regularly. You have changed my life, for the better. So thank you all!

A few months ago, I wrote about the latest Pew Internet Research report that focused on online health information and the world of e-patients. I also shared excerpts:

61% of American adults look online for health information.

In 2000, 46% of American adults had access to the internet, 5% of U.S. households had broadband connections, and 25% of American adults looked online for health information. Now, 74% of American adults go online, 57% of American households have broadband connections, and 61% of adults look online for health information. We use the term “e-patient” to describe this group.

American adults continue to turn to traditional sources of health information, even as many of them deepen their engagement with the online world.

A majority of e-patients access user-generated health information.

Now Susannah Fox who is an Associate Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project and principal author of the Project’s survey reports on e-patients and online health, published a fantastic and very useful guide for interpreting Pew Internet data dedicated to healthcare.

This is my third year blogging about teaching. A profoundly cool byproduct of edublogging is that on occasion you get to be the dealer who hooks someone up with her first hit of online expression. Someone reads something you wrote and her response is visceral enough to overcome her online inhibition and comment. And she lives for awhile in various comment boxes around the blogosphere until those confines cramp her too much and she gets a Blogger or Wordpress blog of her own.

I haven't given enough thought to this but, among the blogs I read and wander past, there seems to be a generational effect at work and it freaks me out. I'm not presuming an exact genetic link, where I gave "birth" to blogs that came after mine. I'm referring to timing.

Chris Lehmann's Practical Theory, for instance, was the first edublog I read. His blog motivated me to turn a private blog public. Jackie Ballarini was one of my earliest commenters who eventually set out to do her own thing. A year after Jackie Ballarini you had Kate Nowak, one of Jackie's readers, now submitting fine work at f(t). A year after Kate Nowak you have Elissa Miller writing up the new teacher experience at Miss Calculate.

No doubt, all of our decisions to hang out our own shingles were motivated by more than just one graybeard blogger. I have no idea, for instance, where Ian Garrovillas, Sam Shah, and Sean Sweeney fit into in this timeline nor do I have any idea if Twitter accelerates or decelerates this process. But the general effect is clear: people take their education into their own hands which provokes other people later on to do the same thing.

It's a process that boggles me a little bit, that makes me want to break out into song a little bit, that I recommend wholeheartedly to new teachers who now have the luxury of selecting mentors from all around the world.

Two questions:

1. Who were you reading before you started blogging? Where were you commenting? How did you get into this? I'm especially curious of people upstream like Chris Lehmann and Christian Long and that Dangerously Irrelevant guy, all of whom basically predate the Internet in my head.
2. Does this place ever seem to you like Lost island? I swear, sometimes I click around and become aware of an entire other side to this place, blogs that link to none of the blogs I read and vice versa. Bud Hunt has written this one up but he doesn't explain how any of us ended up on this side of the island or, more importantly, what the four-toed statute means!