I can’t wait to see what you do to the thousands who contribute to this venture. Resell their content to others so you can claim another business success?

TICKLE! lol

First, in anything I say, presume that my flame level is set to zero. I don’t mind a rant when one is called for, but not flames. My commitment – the reason I spend many hours a week studying healthcare transformation after work – is the creation of a new world of what we’re now calling “participatory medicine,” in which patients play an active role in their well-being and in disease management. There’s a lot of info about this on the e-patient blog, http://e-patients.net.

The work we do there is based on the work of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, long-ago editor of the medical sections of the Whole Earth Catalog and long-time friend of the catalog’s Stuart Brand, Howard Rheingold, and Kevin Kelly. I never met Tom – he died in 2006, and I only joined the e-patient group a year ago, after my own near-death experience with kidney cancer. (At diagnosis my median survival time was 24 weeks, and e-patient practices were a hallmark of my adventure, though I never heard the term until it was all over.)

Doc Tom said that e-patients are “Empowered, Equipped, Engaged and Enabled.” He was a visionary who foresaw that the Internet would bring patients together with information and with each other. This was embodied in a brilliant pair of slides he posted in Jan. 1995, when the Web was less than a year old: http://is.gd/jSjt

Thought I never met him, I imagine he’d be intrigued by Medpedia. But his team amassed a lot of evidence that brings into question the assumption that docs should be the sole ones to say what’s reliable. (Note, I didn’t just say docs are useless or patients know everything! Some people hear me talk and make up those screwy impressions. Docs saved my life!)

Meanwhile, in my day job I’ve spend my career watching what innovations get traction, and have particularly been interested in online communities; twenty years ago this month I first became a sysop (moderator) of a CompuServe forum.

Bottom line, this weekend I burned a few kCal thinking out a way your idea could leverage Web 2.0 and avoid some of the pitfalls patients experience constantly. It’s on the e-patient blog: “Medpedia: who gets to say what info is reliable?” http://is.gd/ktNa

I hope your team will give some thought to it. I hope, equally, they’ll read and consider the substantial data assembled into the e-patient white paper, created by Doc Tom and his team of MDs and other observers.

Thanks, and bon chance –

ePatientDave at e-patients dot net
Blogger profile: http://is.gd/kbxR

Was this a friggin joke line??

(serious question)

(if yes, then congratulations, you’ve just written the worst fucking sentence in the history of techcrunch)

At a glance, Medpedia looks very similar to wikipedia. However, there is a spot for ads at the bottom of articles and on the left side.

Leena, how about dishing up some demographic information that supports your suggestion for the site’s need to integrate Twitter.

Twitter is a great place for distributing information that you want picked up by the virtual soapboxers, and by dorks with no lives that follow them, but how does it represent a demographic valuable to this site?

Not sure I understand the goal behind the negative comments here. You guys would prefer to see an announcement for yet another Twitter clone?

The bottom line is that health information is one of the few categories left with a huge Web 1.0 winner (WebMD) and no real up and coming Web 2.0 competitors. Success for these guys would be good for the Web and for the world. I hope they do well.