Gwagle has been interesting! A few people have used it a lot but mostly people haven’t. As such we’ve had little feedback. Being an alpha test I’m not overly upset by this as that is what the alpha was about – testing perceptions etc. My own conclusion being that, as it stands, there is little obvious gain for busy clinicians to actually use the site. It’s also, probably, a fairly abstract concept for many of those exposed to it. So where to from here?
As it stands, I don’t feel Gwagle (the website) will be the priority. However, Gwagle (as a web-service) will provide the backbone to added functionality to TRIP. To begin with, when the latest deployment to TRIP is released, there will be a ‘comments’ function. This function will be using the Gwagle ‘engine’ to work. Also, comments on TRIP will help populate Gwagle.
The next step is to allow users to add content to TRIP. I see lots of really useful information that doesn’t fit into the ‘usual’ TRIP editorial/upload mechanisms. At the moment I add it to Gwagle (as do other people). As you can see from the ‘latest’ link in Gwagle (click here) there is lots of ‘good stuff’. Yesterday, I added an awful lots of podcasts – there is currently no mechanism to add podcasts to TRIP.
So, this facility will appear as TRIP functionality (as it will be) but it’ll have the Gwagle engine to get it to work. There is also no reason why other groups/organisations can’t use the Gwagle engine to power their own ‘products’.
Moving back to TRIP, the ability to add content will happen, hopefully before the end of the year, and will also incorporate other features to help assess ‘quality’ of the added content (think digg but not focussed on news!).
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