Richard MacManus

I’m at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco – and it reminds me a lot of the Web 2.0 Conferences of 2006-07. The second coming of the Web, coined “Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly and his company, was entering its peak around 2006. If I ever doubted that Web 2.0 was big business, I … Read more

With the increasing digitization of healthcare, the trend of “Big Data” has been gathering steam. According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there is an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm. That’s predicted to grow, by a factor of 50, to 25,000 petabytes by 2020. The report, which I’ve … Read more

YouTube has come to define the era of online video, so let’s take a look at its most popular videos of all time. Our latest update has Justin Bieber still at number 1 with Baby, which was the first video to earn a half a billion views! Also of note is a music video by … Read more

A week ago Facebook got itself caught up in yet another privacy controversy, when old Wall posts from 2007-09 were automatically converted into Timeline posts. The confusion was that for some people, those old posts seemed private in nature. So it was thought that Facebook had mistakenly turned private messages into Timeline posts. Facebook responded … Read more

The adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by doctor practices and hospitals is one of the most exciting developments in health – and the iPad is playing a big part. Up till recently, the typical EMR system was a PC-based enterprise software suite deployed in a large, public hospital. But thanks mainly to the iPad, … Read more

Earlier this month, I finally purchased a DNA test at 23andMe, the personal genetics company based in Silicon Valley. When the test kit arrived, I duly spat into the plastic tube and posted it back. It isn’t cheap, US$299 plus postage, but the results promise to tell me about my ancestry, inherited traits, and any … Read more

In the fifth and final part of our series, Social Books, we explore how the “big six” book publishers use social media. So far in the series we’ve looked at the largest social network for book lovers (Goodreads), a new social network for book writers (Writer’s Bloq), how public libraries use social media, and whether … Read more

Like many of you, I’m connected to the Internet virtually every waking hour of my day – via computer, tablet and mobile phone. Yet I still regularly visit my local public library, in order to borrow books, CDs and DVDs. Which made me wonder: are these two worlds disconnected, or is the Social Web being … Read more

Continuing our Social Books series, today I’m looking at book highlights. The increasing popularity of e-readers, in particular the Kindle, has made it common practice to highlight passages and quotes within books. There have been various efforts to make those highlights social and today I’ll look at the two leading services. One is from Amazon … Read more

Today I reviewed my magazine subscriptions, partly to see which of Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle and digital magazine indie Zinio has the best offering currently. My check reaffirmed many positive things about digital magazines, but one thing still frustrates me: the user experience for subscriptions in both iTunes and Kindle. Apple and Amazon could learn … Read more

Yesterday I reviewed the leading social network for book readers, Goodreads. In the second post in my Social Books series, I’m checking out a brand new social network for book writers. Called Writer’s Bloq, it was founded by a young wannabe writer from New York named Nayia Moysidis. In a phone interview, I discovered that … Read more

My next series of posts is entitled Social Books. Over five posts, I’m going to explore how book readers and writers use social networking tools. Three of the posts will be from the point of view of readers, starting with this one today about the leading social network for bookworms: Goodreads. In the remaining posts, … Read more

In this fifth and final installment of our How To Filter The Social Web series, I’m looking at a mobile service called Prismatic. It’s a slick looking website and iPhone app that filters social news for you. Filtering news on mobile has traditionally been a tough nut to crack – and there’s no shortage of … Read more

I’m on the hunt for five great tools to filter the social Web. The fourth product I’m looking at is Bottlenose, a social media dashboard that allows you to filter content by topic. For example: Andy Murray winning his first Grand Slam tennis title today. Bottlenose was founded by well-regarded Semantic Web geek Nova Spivack. … Read more

I’m on the hunt for five great tools to filter the social Web! Last week I looked at medical news curator Webicina and topic-based news aggregator Reddit. Both of those products enabled me to filter for content. But just as we’re overwhelmed with the amount of content on the social Web, we’re also overwhelmed with … Read more