Did you know that close to 20% of adults searching online for health information visit Internet and social networking sites to talk with medical experts and other patients? These e-patients are looking for tools to connect and share their medical data online. Listen to the National Public Radio interview with Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet and American Life Project regarding this growing trend.

Also, learn how librarians can find new ways to engage e-patients and their families with the Pew Internet online presentation The Rise of the E-Patient: Trends in the use of digital technology for health purposes.

Google released Google Wave, a new real-time collaboration and communication tool, to 100,000 beta testers yesterday. If you’re not one of the early testers but are curious about what Google Wave can do, check out this detailed description in the LifeHacker blog:

http://lifehacker.com/5370738/google-wave-first-look

The Ribbit Wave gadget for conducting conference calls sounds particularly interesting!

Google Sidewiki is a new addition to the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Sidewiki lets you read and post comments about web pages. Google is promoting this as a way to “help and learn from others as you browse the Web” (see http://tinyurl.com/lkbxbw). You can also share a Sidewiki comment via Facebook, Twitter, email, or Web link. Note that Sidewiki only works if you install the Google Toolbar into your browser (Firefox and Internet Explorer only).

To download the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki, go to http://www.google.com/sidewiki. If you try it, please post your comments about the tool on the NewsBits blog!

Are you still using PowerPoint for your teaching? Kay Deeney recently attended the Annual Distance Teaching & Learning Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. One of the interesting talks was on Presentation Blogs by Ray Schroeder and Carrie Levin from the University of Illinois at Springfield. They used their blog, Power Point(less) Alternatives to demonstrate how to give a presentation via a blog. They also highlighted social networking sites such as NING http://www.ning.com/ as another alternative to PowerPoint. The speakers felt that blogs allow interaction through comments; facilitate hyperlinks; and provide a lasting and evolving resource to a topic via RSS feeds on the sidebar. See http://altppt.blogspot.com/ for more information and other links to interesting teaching ideas from these two!

We are happy to announce that MedlinePlus has launched a Twitter feed! You can find the link on the MedlinePlus.gov home page in the lower right hand column. 

The new feed is called medlineplus4you.  When you get a chance, take a look at the other feeds that medlineplus4you follows; there are a number of feeds from other organizations that you might find useful.  For instance, one of the links is to LungAssociation from the American Lung Association, which currently has excellent references to information about air quality and wildfires.  Another is ReadydotGov, the Twitter feed for FEMA website for personal emergency preparedness.

If you’ve been wondering how to find librarians who share valuable information on Twitter, take a look at the “100 Best Twitter Feeds for Librarians” post at onlinecourses.org:

http://www.onlinecourses.org/2009/08/18/100-best-twitter-feeds-for-librarians-of-the-future/

This page lists the kind of information you can expect to find from the librarian’s Twitter page. Note that you don’t have to join Twitter to access other librarian’s Twitter pages; just click on the link in the article.

TwitCam (http://www.twitcam.com) is a new free service that allows you to stream live video to your Twitter followers. You must have a Twitter account to use TwitCam.

TwitCam posts a video description and link for your Twitter followers to find your video. When you are broadcasting from your camera, you can chat with your Twitter followers directly from the broadcast page. You can also record an archive of the broadcast.

Although this is intended for live broadcast to an audience, it could also be used to create a promotional or informational video that you want others to view asynchronously.

At the moment the service has a lot of test videos as examples. It will be interesting to see the videos that are created as the service grows!

Did you know you can search Twitter posts without having a Twitter account? Try Twitter search (http://search.twitter.com) or a new search service, Twazzup (http://twazzup.com). For monitoring multiple Twitter searches in real time, try Twitterfall (http://www.twitterfall.com). All of these services use Twitter search commands; for a list, see http://search.twitter.com/operators. All are free and do not require a Twitter account. If you try any of these, leave a comment and let us know how it worked for you!

The recording of the April 8 online Facebook presentation is now available here:

https://webmeeting.nih.gov/p77789802/

During this presentation, Jeff Williams, Head, Collections & Access Services at UC San Diego, gave an overview of using Facebook as an individual, including how to set up a profile and available tools for communicating with friends. Dominique Turnbow, Undergraduate Services Librarian at UC San Diego, discussed how libraries can use Facebook as an outreach tool and as a mechanism to communicate with library users. Jeff and Dominique responded to a number of questions from the participants.

Have you heard about Facebook and wondered what it was all about? Join us Wednesday, April 8 from 12 noon – 1 pm PT — we’ve invited two librarians from the UC San Diego Biomedical Library to do an online presentation about Facebook.

Jeff Williams, Head, Collections & Access Services, will give an overview of using Facebook as an individual, including how to set up a profile and available tools for communicating with friends. Dominique Turnbow, Undergraduate Services Librarian, will discuss how libraries can use Facebook as an outreach tool and as a mechanism to communicate with library users.

The session is free and no registration is required. All you need to participate is a web browser and a telephone. On the day and time of the session, log in as Guest with your first and last name at https://webmeeting.nih.gov/psrsd. Further instructions calling into the system will be available then.