London highlights

When I was away in London earlier this week, I took the train from Waterloo every morning to Woking. Going to Waterloo was interesting as it was used in a fantastic chase scene in my favourite film of last year, the Bourne Ultimatum. If you want impressive train stations though, the newly refurbished St Pancras looks fantastic and sipping champagne at the champagne bar is a truly continental experience.

Unfortunately, I always find travelling and staying in London for any length of time extremely tedious as it is just so ridiculously expensive, busy, and overcrowded. Fortunately once I had escaped the throngs in Waterloo, I walked out onto Southbank to see the London Eye which was lit up in magenta to celebrate Valentine's Day. The Eye is a truly impressive feat of engineering and it looked spectacular at dusk. The photos are slightly blurred I'm afraid as they were taken with a slow shutter speed but you'll get the idea!

Woking weirdness

I just spent the best part of a week in Woking, Surrey, where I attended a training course .

Due to the fact that I stayed in London for my visit (primarily due to a lack of semi-decent hotels in Woking which was confirmed by my course hosts) I didn't get to see much of Woking, but one of the weird features there is the Tripod sculpture. This sculpture was erected because Woking features in H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds. The mention of Woking in this classic novel however, is actually as the first town to be destroyed by the Tripods. Strange reason to add a monument!


Picture by Puggirl365 - Flickr.com

NHS Healthcare libraries, faster & cheaper than Amazon

I am very lucky. I work with a great team of people now, and I used to work with a great network of librarians in the North West. As part of my research the other day, I found a really interesting citation about some recent research which was conducted by the University of Leeds into Web 2.0 usage amongst medical students and practitioners.
Unfortunately neither my NHS or University Athens accounts gave me access to the resource that I needed, but a quick email to my colleagues in the North West saw that very item allocated and saved for my collection from my local health library the very same day. This is what health libraries do so brilliantly, helping and supporting users to find, consider, and use the resources that they need, and the North West has always had a very strong collaborative network which I hope will continue to operate in this way in the future.
For those who are interested, the article in question is:
TI: Title
Web 2.0 technologies for undergraduate and postgraduate medical
education: an online survey.
AU: Author
Sandars, J; Schroter, S
AF: Affiliation
Medical Education Unit, The University of Leeds, 20 Hyde Terrace,
Leeds LS2 9LN, UK.
SO: Source
Postgraduate medical journal, 2007 Dec, 83(986):759-62
IS: ISSN
1469-0756

Business benefits of Web 2.0 for healthcare giant company

This short video is worth checking out as the (rather unfortunately named) CIO of McKesson (the people behind the NHS electronic staff record) Randy Spratt, outlines the business benefits that Web 2.0 will bring to a company such as his.
Interesting mention of RFIDs too. For an explanation of RFIDs, including their use as human implants, see Wikipedia's definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID

Social networking for architects & disaster relief workers

A lot of people think that social networks are for people with far too much time on their hands; for teenagers, for people who wear heavy metal t-shirts and haven't seen the sun since 1972, or for agoraphobics.

What I'm interested in however, is how we can use social networking and Web 2.0 tools to help us use knowledge and information in our everyday lives. Although I'm researching this from an NHS perspective, I've found some other interesting examples of social networking sites which are used by professionals to assist humanitarian relief.
I have a couple of friends who are architects and I think the Open Architecture Network is a fantastic example of a profession sharing knowledge across the world to help them aid people who are suffering due to disaster or poverty. Check it out, it's interesting even if architecture isn't your thing!

I also found an interesting article about how some relief organisations are using wikis to share knowledge quickly in emergency situations. This article's focus is however around how access to that knowledge is still far from ideal due to the construction of the Internet and the way that data is currently searched. It argues that Semantic web (a.k.a. Web 3.0) processes will help t0 label information in a way that makes it much more easily retrievable; something which is beneficial for all users of the Internet, but especially to those where quick access to information is vital. Very interesting.