Hyphen Digital’s News Watch Week Ending 6/26/2009
Digital Terms of the Week
Open Source: A program’s source code is public. Anyone can modify and distribute; frequently developed as a community not a single organization.
RSS feeds: a continuously updated version of the site’s latest content, in a form that can be read by a newsreader or aggregator.
Useful Link
http://www.twitter.com/HyphenNY — follow our daily updates
Technology Articles
Google to ease their trademark regulation (Bloomberg)
Google is going to allow U.S. advertisers to use trademarked terms, which they do not own the rights to, to appear in ad text on search-results pages. This will be beneficial for companies and stores that sell multiple different brands. For example, a drug store may use the word Pfizer in their ad-text but is unable to buy the keyword Pfizer. Google will still honor trademark owners request to block competitors or third parties from buying the trademarked term as a keyword.
So What? This will increase competition on Google search results pages
Healthcare Insight- We should share this with our clients as their competitors may be listing their company name to give their number of Google search results a boost.
Social Media is now being taught in the classroom (Mashable)
Professors are aware that their students know the ins and outs of such social networking sites as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and recognize that a class on them is not necessary. They have switched their focus to teaching students’ ways to use these online collaboration tools to enhance their reporting and journalism tactics.
So what? We are living in a time where CNN was criticized for reporting on the developing Iran protests in an untimely manner. In response, CNN started placing a higher emphasis on their user-generated reporting site, iReport. This is a sign that traditional reporters need to get in touch with the modern ways of communicating.
Healthcare Industry Insight- Healthcare companies need to get more involved with social media so their news stories be distributed and read in real-time to keep up with the new modes of communication.
The White House Launched Live Video Chat on Facebook (Mashable)
Anyone who watched the inauguration online was directed to Facebook Connect (to learn more about Facebook Connect click here). The White House is now using Facebook Connect for their healthcare policy debate in an effort to keep the citizens involved in the discussions.
So What? You can participate in these discussions by posting questions and comments that will appear as status updates that are broadcast your friends.
The Iran Situation has had an interesting impact on social media
For those of you aware of and following the developing situation in Iran you know that our primary source of information is coming from social media. Most of the information is being passed through Twitter but Iranians are also communicating by blogging and posting on Facebook.
For more information on this please visit the following links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/world/middleeast/16media.html?_r=3&ref=world
http://mashable.com/2009/06/20/google-maps-iran/
http://mashable.com/2009/06/20/moussavi-facebook/
Scientific Articles
Open Source Biology (Slashdot)
Open source collaboration has lead to many advances in technology and it appears that the scientific world is planning on trying it out with the help of DIYbio.
So What? This may start to change the way people practice science.
Possibly insuring all Americans (Slashdot)
The Democratic Party drafted a bill that will require all Americans to have health insurance. It would also require employers to provide benefits to their employees or at minimum assist in paying for them. They are also calling for a public insurance program run by the government to compete with private insurance companies.
So What? There has been a lot of talk of adopting a universal healthcare system. Supporters feel this is a capitalistic way of approaching this and those in opposition feel it is one step closer to a government controlled healthcare system.
Interesting Links
iPhone 3G S is now available- This is a guide to the new iPhone 3G S
Wikipedia is going to add video- Wikipedia was strictly a photo and content based site but soon they will be expanding their offerings to video.
Another real-time search engine- People want real-time information and Crowd Eye is a search engine that is trying to provide you with real-time results of your search
The reason we are posting a digital word of the day on the HyphenNY Twitter account- Most of the people interviewed in this Mashable video did not know what a browser was and were unable to distinguish the difference between a browser and a search engine.
It appears that Google is almost ready to release its Google Voice service to the public- Google Voice is going to be a free service that will allow users to unify their phone numbers. They may use a single number through this service that will call all of the user’s phones. It also has other interesting features that you can learn about by clicking here.
