Transcendigital blog

Less than a month after Google Inc. launched Google Health, a site where consumers can store medical data online, it nabbed the first insurer to participate in the effort.

Google today announced that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has agreed to let its members import personal claims data to their Google Health profiles. The move blunts some of the program’s early critics, who had complained about the lack of support from insurance companies. Because insurers have claims data that spans various doctors, hospitals and pharmacies, they are often seen as a key to providing adequate data to populate personal health records (PHR) systems.

“Our members tell us they want easier and more portable access to their health care information,” said Steven Fox, the insurer’s vice president of provider network management, in a statement. “Having this information in one place can play an important role in managing a member’s health and in helping members and their doctors make health care decisions that can improve the quality of care they receive.”

Article Link:computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9097418&intsrc=hm_list

When you search on Google, we often offer you “related” search suggestions to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly. We identify related search queries by evaluating data from multiple sources. Our algorithms try to ensure that we offer suggestions when they are most likely to help users. These algorithms also determine how many related search queries to display, and their location on the search results page. Therefore, you won’t see related search suggestions for every query, and while they are usually shown below the search results, the algorithm sometimes causes them to display above the search results.

Article Link:googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/fresher-related-search-suggestions.html

Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit health maintenance organization, is endorsing the drive toward consumer-controlled personal health records in a partnership with Microsoft.

The partnership, announced Monday, will begin with a pilot project open to Kaiser’s 156,000 employees, which will run until November. If successful, the product linking Kaiser’s patient information with Microsoft’s Health Vault personal health record service will be offered to Kaiser’s 8.7 million members in nine states and the District of Columbia.

“This is a big step for us, and our first partnership with a consumer health record supplier,” said Anna-Lisa Silvestre, Kaiser’s vice president for online services.

There are several companies offering personal health records on the Web, but the big new players are Microsoft, which entered the field last October, and Google, which came in last month.

The two big technology companies bring the potential to hasten the adoption of electronic health records, which are seen as an important tool in improving the quality of medical care and containing costs. And the Microsoft and Google health offerings give individuals control of their own health records, as well as responsibility for them.

Today, most electronic health records are maintained by health providers and insurers, allowing individuals access to their records through the Web. But those records are typically controlled by the institutions, and are not portable when a person changes insurers or health providers or moves to another part of the country.

Both Microsoft and Google have previously announced collaborative pilot projects with other health providers. For Microsoft, they include the Mayo Clinic and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. For Google, they include the Cleveland Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

But the Kaiser move, analysts say, is significant given the California-based health company’s size and its reputation as an innovative user of information technology.

Article Link:www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/business/10kaiser.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

TownSquare is simply a test platform says Office Labs

Microsoft’s Office Labs section has been working on a prototype social networking application that is said to be very similar to Facebook. The main difference is that the Office Labs social networking platform — called TownSquare — is not meant for general use on the internet.

Rather, TownSquare is an application designed to allow enterprise employees to keep in touch with other employees in the enterprise. Office Labs was asked by the SharePoint and Office product development teams to create TownSquare according to InfoWorld.

Article Link:www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+Office+Labs+Produces+Facebook+Style+Social+Networking+Platform/article12050.htm

This new API provides access to one of the largest collections of address books on the Internet–the contact system behind Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Go. This means your applications already have a built-in audience. The Address Book API supports a wide range of third-party apps, such as sending invitations to seed social networks or social apps, looking up postal addresses for shipping services for online retail, and providing address “auto-complete” for messaging apps.

The API has extensive search capabilities. Once a user authorizes your application, you’ll be able to easily access that user’s address book and look for specific contacts. If you want to see which contacts are new, you can ask what’s changed since the last time you accessed the API.

Article Link:developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/06/addressbook_api.html

Microsoft Corp. today set its June patch list, saying it would issue seven security updates, three of them “critical,” to patch Windows components such as Bluetooth, DirectX and Internet Explorer (IE).

It also looks like Microsoft will disable a vulnerable third-party program, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc.

“Maybe this is a new trend by Microsoft, issuing kill bit updates to mitigate risks,” said Storms, referring to one of the seven updates. “Kill bit” is the term Microsoft coins to describe setting a flag in the Windows registry that disables a specific ActiveX control; the company regularly advises users to set the kill bit in lieu of a formal patch for a control that contains a bug.

Article Link:computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9093958&intsrc=hm_list

Search Engine Watch Forums have noted that Google has changed the definition they used for what a doorway page is.

On the Google Page, it now reads:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.

The cached version still has the previous version:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links – often several hundred – that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Key sentences, words and adjectives have been removed and replaced by more generic terms. Google seems to have re-written it to discuss less of the technical nature of the page and more of the desired outcome of such a page.

In any event, all SEOs should know about the change.

Article Resource:www.seroundtable.com/archives/017282.html

Additional Resource:www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

Google on Tuesday plans to launch Google Site Search, a re-branded version of Google Custom Search Business Edition.

Site Search, like its less elegantly named predecessor, gives businesses a way to offer Google search on their own Web sites.

“Search continues to be the way people find information,” said Google enterprise product director Matt Glotzbach. “It has really taken over as the navigation paradigm for the Web. We’re really set on addressing that and creating a hosted search offering that’s accessible to everyone.”

The new Site Search offers enhanced index coverage. It now indexes documents on public sites that otherwise wouldn’t be indexed. Glotzbach described these files as “content that the crawler knows about but isn’t in the main index due to space constraints.” Public documents hidden behind submission forms represent the types of files that might not normally make it into Google’s index, he explained.

Site Search now handles synonyms, so a search for “car” will now include “automobiles,” for example. And Site Search administrators can add their own custom synonym dictionary to associate specific search terms with each other.

Article Continues:www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208401667

The Open Source Movement looks ready to score a big victory with the addition of Facebook to its fold

MySpace recently made news when it announced that it was breaking with its tradition and “bringing down the garden walls”, allowing its user information to be shared. It also pledged to adopt open APIs and authentication interfaces. Of course, Facebook has already long had limited versions of such measures in place. Now Facebook is looking to keep up with its larger competitor, MySpace by open sourcing its application code.

According to news site TechCrunch, Facebook is planning to release the source code for its entire application platform. The move, according to the report, will be announced within a few days.

Article link:www.dailytech.com/Report+Facebook+to+go+Open+Source/article11890.htm

There’s been a bit of speculation about BrowserPlus, the mysterious new platform from Yahoo!. Today we remove that veil of mystery to show you directly what it is, what it does, and why we can’t wait to hear what you think.

BrowserPlus is a platform for extending the Web: an end-user installs it and a developer uses its features through a small JavaScript library. Some of the features that exist in the platform today include:

* Drag-and-drop from the desktop
* Client-side image manipulation (cropping, rotation & filters)
* Desktop notifications

The most unique attribute of BrowserPlus is its ability to update and add new services on the fly without a browser restart or even reloading the page! For users, this means no more interruptions or installers to run. We handle the complexity of software distribution and updates. For developers, it means you can check for and activate new services with a single function call (pending user approval, of course). BrowserPlus is dynamic, allowing us to implement the standards of tomorrow while enabling fun and playful web applications along the way.

A small group of folks has been working on BrowserPlus in a dark room for about a year now. Getting this platform outside the walls of Yahoo! and into the developer community is extremely important to us. We’re eager to give you something you can touch and feel and respond to, even if it’s not quite ready to use on your own site yet.

article link:developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/05/browserplus.html