Excellent online article by Howard Swains from the new Wired UK Site on how some online tales of death and suffering are fictional – “pseuicides”. Some are contrived to titillate or garner attention, some result from something more serious, and some are the result of a uniquely modern psychiatric disorder known as Munchausen by internet.

Reports of my death

Source : Wired UK

Interesting interview about Lifescan which was amongst the features demonstrated at the iPhone 3.0 update announcement. The announcement was important for developers because applications can be more effective as the user no longer has to remember to click on the app to get reminders – they can now be “pushed” to the phone like a text message.

In the interview Dave Detmers discusses the company’s demo at Apple’s event and fleshes out the background story on its Bluetooth-enabled blood glucose monitor that synchs up with the iPhone 3.0 OS. LifeScan is a Johnson & Johnson company focused primarily on diabetes monitoring devices and software.

MobiHealthNews Full Interview

Runkeeper is a great little application (free or paid for) that allows you to log the time and length of how far you have run, walk, or ridden. Utilising the GPS feature of the iPhone it allows you to easily track your speed, pace, and elevation, record and map routes (using GPS) and even share your fitness activities and progress with friends.

Easy to use and contrary to some reviews it hasn’t eaten into my iPhone battery too much so far. Great stuff !

Runkeeper Site

When I came to write my study guide – Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and More – I never really envisioned it being offered for sale all over the world (although the concepts comfortably fit global teaching environments and university students or staff members trying to get their head around the world of Web 2.0). It’s therefore been a nice surprise to see it being offered in a variety of different worldwide locations including:

Canada
USA
Japan
France
and Germany

and given me a renewed perspective on the global phenomenon and concepts of web 2.0 from an academic viewpoint. I hope it is internationally of use.

ps not to leave the UK out :

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and More (Pocket Study Skills)

A British physicist has revealed his plan to launch a new internet search engine so powerful that one expert has suggested it “could be as important as Google”. Wolfram|Alpha, to be launched in May, is intended designed to synthesize huge amounts of data on the Web and answer questions….(not sure about that name though!)

Source: Guardian Technology – British search engine ‘could rival Google’

Source: ZDNet Education

Wolfram|Alpha Blog

Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest ‘tweets’ of upcoming trends and custom searches on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime. For popular trends, Twitter is queried from the Twitterfall server, and results are pushed to your browser, rather than your browser doing the queries, or your computer polling our server repeatedly. This means using Twitterfall for popular trends is nicer on Twitter than other services…..worth having a play with if you get the chance

Visit Twitterfall

The Diary of Samuel Pepys is being published online as a blog which also presents a new way of historical learning via web 2.0 technology…..

Source: Daily Telegraph Technology Section

View The Blog