Trip Database Blog

After a brief indexing problem the full content of TRIP Answers (http://www.tripanswers.org/) is now searchable via the main TRIP Database.

The clinical cases and images blog has published a quick review Twitter Wins Over RSS? which highlights some of the benefits of twitter.

Due to twitter I came across another post TripAnswers or Twitter?. It’s nice to see we’re being talked about and highlights the usefullness of twitter.

For interest my twitter address is http://twitter.com/JRBtrip

Be warned, twitter is an acquired taste, but once you get over the initial learning curve (not that steep) you may well be hooked. If you try, and get confused, just let me know and I’ll help you out.

A really interesting post at Search Engine Land (click here) about how Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, used Google to keep an eye on new information on a condition he appears to suffer from – Spasmodic Dysphonia.

A new piece of research gets published and the rather nice Google Alerts sends him and e-mail and Scott goes to his doctor.

At long last TRIP Answers is out there, give it a whirl here.

I am absolutely delighted to reveal that Excelencia Clinica has just been released.

Excelencia Clinica is a collaboration between the Spanish Ministry of Health, the Iberoamerican Cochrane Center and TRIP.

In a nutshell, Excelencia Clinica is a search engine based on the TRIP Database. However, it contains material in both Spanish and English and allows users to search in either language.

Historically, TRIP has received a large following from Spanish language countries and therefore I’m very pleased that this new site will give them a much enhanced search experience.

Not being from the USA I do not appreciate the importance of Thanksgiving, I understand that it’s an important festival and it appears to divert attention away from the internet. I say that as I noticed a change in the usage pattern of TRIP (over 20% of our users are from the USA). I then compared that to the year before and the same pattern.

Typically, the usage is a gentle hump with a peak around the start of the weak and a trough on Saturday. The pattern is always the same, the only difference being the numbers. This week it has been a pretty straight line – that is what caught my eye.

In the image below (click to enlarge) I’ve compared 2007 (when Thanksgiving was the 22nd November) to 2008 (when Thanksgiving was 27th November).

I’m a bit of a nerd.

Being a nerd means living and breathing nerdy things. This can be problematic and one acute danger is that your nerdy sources of information hype nerdy things. This is fine if you keep this in the context that, most people are not nerds!

Bottom line is that I often should step back and think whether or not a new technology is actually useful to the general population or whether it really is just for nerds.

I’m saying this in relation to Twitter. I’ve been resistent to try it as I just felt it was too nerdy. However, I recently decided to ‘dip my toe’ and am starting to enjoy the experience. To me, Twitter takes the only useful thing in Facebook – the friend feed (where you say what you’re doing) – and makes that the central feature. You sign-up to follow friends/colleagues tweets and their postings get added to your page. These tweets are a maximum of 140 characters, so brevity is the order of the day.

My twitter page is http://twitter.com/jrbtrip

We’re currently planning the next upgrade to TRIP, hopefully starting work in early 2009 and released 2-3 months afterwards.

We’re being very ambitious with our plans and before we finalise the specification we are very keen to get as much user input as possible. Therefore, if you have any suggestions to improve any aspect of TRIP please leave your comments on this blog or via this form (click here).

Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search has recently been published by Microsoft click here.