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docWeb Learning Center
docWebTRC brings an abundance of technical information to interested physicians through our news, library and forum features. Those areas of the site may, at times, present information that is technical in nature. The learning center page is a collection of short articles. Site visitors who are unfamiliar with Internet and eCommerce terms may benefit from the Basic Learning Section. Periodically, articles of interest from the library or articles written exclusively for docWebTRC may be posted in the Advanced Learning Section. We welcome your comments. We also encourage contributions of material that you have found or have written that may be of use to other vistitors. Please visit the contributors section for info on how to submit an article.
Basic Learning Section
Advanced Learning Section
| · | What is a domain name? |
| · | Security 101 - What is SSL and TSL? |
| · | How to get your website found on Search Engines? |
What is a domain name?
Most computers connected to the Internet are identified by a unique number called an IP address (for instance, 234.208.19.345). If you type the IP address into the URL bar of your browser you will be taken to the web site it relates to. As well as being hard to remember, IP addresses are also FIXED (i.e. they lead to only one page, for example a homepage). Domain names offer a more intuitive way to name and find a website. Each domain name replaces a string of meaningless numbers (an IP address) with a simple word or expression. Examples of domain names are google, ebay, amazon or any string of words that comes between the www and the .com of a webpage’s address.
Most computers connected to the Internet are identified by a unique number called an IP address (for instance, 234.208.19.345). If you type the IP address into the URL bar of your browser you will be taken to the web site it relates to. As well as being hard to remember, IP addresses are also FIXED (i.e. they lead to only one page, for example a homepage). Domain names offer a more intuitive way to name and find a website. Each domain name replaces a string of meaningless numbers (an IP address) with a simple word or expression. Examples of domain names are google, ebay, amazon or any string of words that comes between the www and the .com of a webpage’s address.
What is SSL and TLS?
Both Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols which provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, email, e-commerce, remote access and other data transfers.
TLS makes sure that no third party can eavesdrop or tamper with any message that is passed between the client and the host. It does this by creating the TLS Handshake Protocol which allows the server and client to authenticate each other and to negotiate an encryption algorithm and cryptographic keys before data is exchanged. This communication remains invisible to customers, except when the customer is asked if they want to enter/exit a secure connection.
All TLS/SSL Certificates are issued to either companies or legally accountable individuals. Typically a certificate will contain the domain name, the company name, the address, the city, the state and the country. It will also contain the expiration date of the Certificate and details of the Certification Authority responsible for the issuance of the Certificate. When a browser connects to a secure site it will retrieve the site's TLS/SSL Certificate and check that it has not expired, it has been issued by a Certification Authority the browser trusts, and that it is being used by the website for which it has been issued. If it fails on any one of these checks the browser will display a warning to the end user letting them know that the site is not secured by TLS/SSL.
Both Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols which provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, email, e-commerce, remote access and other data transfers.
TLS makes sure that no third party can eavesdrop or tamper with any message that is passed between the client and the host. It does this by creating the TLS Handshake Protocol which allows the server and client to authenticate each other and to negotiate an encryption algorithm and cryptographic keys before data is exchanged. This communication remains invisible to customers, except when the customer is asked if they want to enter/exit a secure connection.
All TLS/SSL Certificates are issued to either companies or legally accountable individuals. Typically a certificate will contain the domain name, the company name, the address, the city, the state and the country. It will also contain the expiration date of the Certificate and details of the Certification Authority responsible for the issuance of the Certificate. When a browser connects to a secure site it will retrieve the site's TLS/SSL Certificate and check that it has not expired, it has been issued by a Certification Authority the browser trusts, and that it is being used by the website for which it has been issued. If it fails on any one of these checks the browser will display a warning to the end user letting them know that the site is not secured by TLS/SSL.
How to get your website found on search engines?
Having a great looking site filled with a wide range of products is all well and good but you need the site to be found first by your potential customers.
Today over 80% of internet surfers will head straight to a search engine before going anywhere else to find the websites and information that they are after. Ranking highly on the major search engines is therefore of paramount importance for the success of your online business. To achieve this success there are two options available for you:
~Natural Search Engine Optimisation
~Pay Per Click Marketing
Natural Search Engine Optimization
If you get it right this is a sure fire way of bringing in vast amounts of new traffic but it is a time consuming process and can take up to 6 months to start seeing any good results.
The length of time it takes is all down to the way the search engines index your site. At undefined intervals the search engine spiders, as they are known, will crawl the internet and go through all the sites and look at all the pages and reference them. It is this referencing that dictates how highly you rank on the search engines. Your site will be played off against other sites to decide which has more relevance and rank accordingly. There are actions that you can carry out to help this process.
Assigning Meta Information To All The Pages
The meta information is the first port of call for the search engine spiders when they come to index your site and is built up of three key areas:
Meta Title
This should ideally be 50 to 80 characters long (including spaces) and include 1 or 2 of the most important key- words or phrases for your business. This will be the text that is shown at the top of the page in the blue bar so should be relevant. A good example is: “Magenta - Surrey Based Bathroom and Plumbing Supplies Company”
Meta Description
Around 150 to 200 characters long the meta description should contain the most important keywords or phrases with the most prevelant words at the beginning of the piece. In essence you are trying to put your most relevant keywords and phrases into a sentence so a good example would be: “Magenta is designed for the plumbing and bathroom industry and offers a quickly deployed online catalogue and e-commerce website that will give you or improve upon your current online presence.”
Meta Keywords/Phrases
Ideally the meta keywords or phrases would be no longer than 1000 characters and would be built up of 10 keywords or phrases. The phrases should be a maximum of 2 words and you should only use any 1 word up to a maximum of 5 times. Example keywords would be: “bathrooms, bathroom taps, corner baths, etc”
By having all the meta information in place you are helping the search engines to decipher what your site is all about and rank it accordingly.
As opposed to having to go through every page and enter this information the Magenta solution has been developed to automatically populate the meta information with the description that you have entered for the products.
Relevant Page Content
After the search engine spiders have gone through the meta information for all the pages they will then go through the content on the pages themselves to see how relevant the additional copy is.
When writing the product information it is important to be as thorough as possible. This is not only good from a sales perspective but also for the search engines. Trying to mention 1 or 2 of your keywords or phrases within the text helps the search engines to identify that the page has linked information to the meta information and will give it a higher rank.
Suitable Links
Linking to other sites helps enormously as the search engines will view your site as one that is providing reference to other sites and therefore look upon it more favourably. At the very least if you have another site that you trade from this should be linked to. Ideally you would place this in the ‘info’ space on the website.
Submitting Your Site To The Search Engines
Initially your site needs to be found by the search engines and so you need to let them know it is there by submitting the information to them. However you should also submit your site to other regional listings to help improve its ranking.
Pay Per Click Marketing
There is no denying that natural search engine optimization is an excellent way of getting your site found but it is not the only way. Pay Per Click Marketing allows you to get to the top of the search engines in the sponsored listings by bidding for your position by saying how much you wish to spend on each click everytime someone clicks on you ad.
If you specify 10p and your competitor says they want to spend 11p then you will below them in the rankings. You do however only get charged when someone clicks on your ad. However by setting relevant specific search terms you know that those clicking on your ads are actually interested in buying what you sell.
The sponsored listings are usually located in the first 3 listings on the main list and also the right hand banner results.
The number of sponsored results are simply governed by the amount of people who choose that particular term so it may be only 1 or it may be more.
Having a great looking site filled with a wide range of products is all well and good but you need the site to be found first by your potential customers.
Today over 80% of internet surfers will head straight to a search engine before going anywhere else to find the websites and information that they are after. Ranking highly on the major search engines is therefore of paramount importance for the success of your online business. To achieve this success there are two options available for you:
~Natural Search Engine Optimisation
~Pay Per Click Marketing
Natural Search Engine Optimization
If you get it right this is a sure fire way of bringing in vast amounts of new traffic but it is a time consuming process and can take up to 6 months to start seeing any good results.
The length of time it takes is all down to the way the search engines index your site. At undefined intervals the search engine spiders, as they are known, will crawl the internet and go through all the sites and look at all the pages and reference them. It is this referencing that dictates how highly you rank on the search engines. Your site will be played off against other sites to decide which has more relevance and rank accordingly. There are actions that you can carry out to help this process.
Assigning Meta Information To All The Pages
The meta information is the first port of call for the search engine spiders when they come to index your site and is built up of three key areas:
Meta Title
This should ideally be 50 to 80 characters long (including spaces) and include 1 or 2 of the most important key- words or phrases for your business. This will be the text that is shown at the top of the page in the blue bar so should be relevant. A good example is: “Magenta - Surrey Based Bathroom and Plumbing Supplies Company”
Meta Description
Around 150 to 200 characters long the meta description should contain the most important keywords or phrases with the most prevelant words at the beginning of the piece. In essence you are trying to put your most relevant keywords and phrases into a sentence so a good example would be: “Magenta is designed for the plumbing and bathroom industry and offers a quickly deployed online catalogue and e-commerce website that will give you or improve upon your current online presence.”
Meta Keywords/Phrases
Ideally the meta keywords or phrases would be no longer than 1000 characters and would be built up of 10 keywords or phrases. The phrases should be a maximum of 2 words and you should only use any 1 word up to a maximum of 5 times. Example keywords would be: “bathrooms, bathroom taps, corner baths, etc”
By having all the meta information in place you are helping the search engines to decipher what your site is all about and rank it accordingly.
As opposed to having to go through every page and enter this information the Magenta solution has been developed to automatically populate the meta information with the description that you have entered for the products.
Relevant Page Content
After the search engine spiders have gone through the meta information for all the pages they will then go through the content on the pages themselves to see how relevant the additional copy is.
When writing the product information it is important to be as thorough as possible. This is not only good from a sales perspective but also for the search engines. Trying to mention 1 or 2 of your keywords or phrases within the text helps the search engines to identify that the page has linked information to the meta information and will give it a higher rank.
Suitable Links
Linking to other sites helps enormously as the search engines will view your site as one that is providing reference to other sites and therefore look upon it more favourably. At the very least if you have another site that you trade from this should be linked to. Ideally you would place this in the ‘info’ space on the website.
Submitting Your Site To The Search Engines
Initially your site needs to be found by the search engines and so you need to let them know it is there by submitting the information to them. However you should also submit your site to other regional listings to help improve its ranking.
Pay Per Click Marketing
There is no denying that natural search engine optimization is an excellent way of getting your site found but it is not the only way. Pay Per Click Marketing allows you to get to the top of the search engines in the sponsored listings by bidding for your position by saying how much you wish to spend on each click everytime someone clicks on you ad.
If you specify 10p and your competitor says they want to spend 11p then you will below them in the rankings. You do however only get charged when someone clicks on your ad. However by setting relevant specific search terms you know that those clicking on your ads are actually interested in buying what you sell.
The sponsored listings are usually located in the first 3 listings on the main list and also the right hand banner results.
The number of sponsored results are simply governed by the amount of people who choose that particular term so it may be only 1 or it may be more.
Search Engine Optimization: Facts and Fiction
Both A recent visit to Google revealed that a search for the term “Search Engine Optimization” found just a few less than 40 million references. Not only that, but the ad pages alongside and above the search result were completely full. Search engine optimization(SEO) is becoming an increasingly big business and it seems that just about everyone has a product for it, except the search engine vendors themselves.
In our learning basics section, there is a pretty good primer on simple SEO, but knowing the mechanics and being able to work the mechanics are entirely different matters. Of all the products and services we have at docWebTRC, the SEO products are the most challenging. Executing good SEO is not quite witchcraft, but it is not pure engineering either. And you should absolutely ignore the hyperbole presented by some of the less credible SEO vendors because statistics can be brutally deceiving.
As an example, one doctor who is a client of ours, gets the following search results.
- Search Dr. Name -not found in the first 1000.
- Search Dr. Name and Town -several references are found, but none to his site.
- Search Practice Name -found somewhere around page 78 of the search results.
- Search Practice Name and Town -improved, but still not very findable.
- Search domain name -pops up at #1.
A less than scrupulous vendor would tell the doctor that he was getting top 10 results. And this was with just one search engine. Credible search optimization should deal with at least the top 3 engines.
Using the traditional methods of submitting your site to various search engines, tuning metadata tags and establishing viable cross-links with other sites will eventually move you up the ladder in search engine results. For web site owners who need faster results, pay-per-click advertising is the only surefire way of getting them.
Is Pay-per-Click the Answer?
Pay-per-click is reasonably affordable if you can focus on 2 or 3 top search engines. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are the top 3, and 95% of the web searches conducted in the US are handled by the top 14 search engines. The challenges of designing a pay-per-click campaign are exactly the same as designing a native SEO campaign and I'll get to those challenges in a minute.
The things to be wary of in pay-per-click are “click fraud” and “keyword arbitrage”. Click fraud is a major problem for the search engine companies themselves and they are getting better at detecting it, unfortunately the criminals are getting better technologies as well. The typical setup would be for someone to develop multiple advertising sites (sites that accept promotional advertising from search engine vendors, for example docWebTRC displays Google ads). Then the fraud begins where that individual gets others or other technologies to create bogus clicks. The search engine pays for the clicks. The advertised website pays for the clicks. No real web traffic is generated.
Keyword arbitrage is the bidding up of common keywords and then reselling the keyword or providing a redirect from a site. This creates an artificially high cost for the advertiser and gets the arbiter a quick profit without really providing a service.
New medical practices and specialty practices in competitive situations depend on a constant inflow of new patients. Those situations are definitely good candidates for a pay-per-click campaign. Almost everyone else with a medical practice website should stay with the native SEO techniques .
Challenges
The challenges of either technique, and the “witchcraft” that is involved comes when you have to try to anticipate what your clients and potential clients will type in their browser search and anticipate which search engines they are most likely to use. In the example we used above, it is unthinkable that typing a search for practice name and town did not yield a better result. However getting onto the first search page result with cardiologist Boston is possible but very difficult to make happen.
So What Can a Doctor Do?
Everyone will use native SEO, but some will spend more time and effort on this than others. Not everyone will use pay-per-click. The first step is to determine which approach will best meet the needs of your practice.
Next, make a reasonable business judgment about what the value is to your practice to get on the first, second or third page of results in your favorite search engine. Now you'll have to do this for multiple search engines, so divide that value by 2.5. The resulting number should be the maximum amount you are willing to spend to optimize 1 search engine. Remember, that you don't necessarily have to spend the same dollar amount on each search engine. You might put 70% of your budget towards Yahoo search and allocate the rest across the next 4 or 5 most important search engines.
Armed with your budget, talk to the experts here at docWebTRC and you may want to inquire with some of the other firms just to get a good second opinion. There are hundreds of approaches to solving this problem. We, of course, are very bias towards out own solutions.
Whether you decide to buy additional pay-per-click or do extended work using native SEO, it makes absolute sense to have your site optimized for meta-tags (a reasonably inexpensive option) and to have it submitted to several search engines every quarter. You can submit the site yourself, but again, that service is reasonably priced both from docWebTRC and from others.
Is there an advantage to using docWebTRC?
There are two advantages with docWeb's services. We only offer our services on docWeb sites. We are intimately familiar with those sites and combining that knowledge with an understanding of how your visitors navigate on your site, we can target specific pages to be more prevalent.
The second advantage is for our advanced SEO services. While it is impossible for us to guarantee search engine results, the advanced services come with the docWeb satisfaction guarantee. We accomplish this by meeting with each client to understand their business goal. Using our analysis of relevant keywords and the specifics of the practice, we only accept business where we feel strongly that the business objectives can be met. If they are not, the client's money is refunded. We don't know of anyone else in the business who makes that same offer.
The entire docWebTRC enterprise exists to help medical practitioners get more our of their eCommerce opportunities. So whether you use our services or not, you can always reach out to our experts for advise and help with SEO or any other part of your eCommerce portfolio.
Both A recent visit to Google revealed that a search for the term “Search Engine Optimization” found just a few less than 40 million references. Not only that, but the ad pages alongside and above the search result were completely full. Search engine optimization(SEO) is becoming an increasingly big business and it seems that just about everyone has a product for it, except the search engine vendors themselves.
In our learning basics section, there is a pretty good primer on simple SEO, but knowing the mechanics and being able to work the mechanics are entirely different matters. Of all the products and services we have at docWebTRC, the SEO products are the most challenging. Executing good SEO is not quite witchcraft, but it is not pure engineering either. And you should absolutely ignore the hyperbole presented by some of the less credible SEO vendors because statistics can be brutally deceiving.
As an example, one doctor who is a client of ours, gets the following search results.
- Search Dr. Name -not found in the first 1000.
- Search Dr. Name and Town -several references are found, but none to his site.
- Search Practice Name -found somewhere around page 78 of the search results.
- Search Practice Name and Town -improved, but still not very findable.
- Search domain name -pops up at #1.
A less than scrupulous vendor would tell the doctor that he was getting top 10 results. And this was with just one search engine. Credible search optimization should deal with at least the top 3 engines.
Using the traditional methods of submitting your site to various search engines, tuning metadata tags and establishing viable cross-links with other sites will eventually move you up the ladder in search engine results. For web site owners who need faster results, pay-per-click advertising is the only surefire way of getting them.
Is Pay-per-Click the Answer?
Pay-per-click is reasonably affordable if you can focus on 2 or 3 top search engines. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are the top 3, and 95% of the web searches conducted in the US are handled by the top 14 search engines. The challenges of designing a pay-per-click campaign are exactly the same as designing a native SEO campaign and I'll get to those challenges in a minute.
The things to be wary of in pay-per-click are “click fraud” and “keyword arbitrage”. Click fraud is a major problem for the search engine companies themselves and they are getting better at detecting it, unfortunately the criminals are getting better technologies as well. The typical setup would be for someone to develop multiple advertising sites (sites that accept promotional advertising from search engine vendors, for example docWebTRC displays Google ads). Then the fraud begins where that individual gets others or other technologies to create bogus clicks. The search engine pays for the clicks. The advertised website pays for the clicks. No real web traffic is generated.
Keyword arbitrage is the bidding up of common keywords and then reselling the keyword or providing a redirect from a site. This creates an artificially high cost for the advertiser and gets the arbiter a quick profit without really providing a service.
New medical practices and specialty practices in competitive situations depend on a constant inflow of new patients. Those situations are definitely good candidates for a pay-per-click campaign. Almost everyone else with a medical practice website should stay with the native SEO techniques .
Challenges
The challenges of either technique, and the “witchcraft” that is involved comes when you have to try to anticipate what your clients and potential clients will type in their browser search and anticipate which search engines they are most likely to use. In the example we used above, it is unthinkable that typing a search for practice name and town did not yield a better result. However getting onto the first search page result with cardiologist Boston is possible but very difficult to make happen.
So What Can a Doctor Do?
Everyone will use native SEO, but some will spend more time and effort on this than others. Not everyone will use pay-per-click. The first step is to determine which approach will best meet the needs of your practice.
Next, make a reasonable business judgment about what the value is to your practice to get on the first, second or third page of results in your favorite search engine. Now you'll have to do this for multiple search engines, so divide that value by 2.5. The resulting number should be the maximum amount you are willing to spend to optimize 1 search engine. Remember, that you don't necessarily have to spend the same dollar amount on each search engine. You might put 70% of your budget towards Yahoo search and allocate the rest across the next 4 or 5 most important search engines.
Armed with your budget, talk to the experts here at docWebTRC and you may want to inquire with some of the other firms just to get a good second opinion. There are hundreds of approaches to solving this problem. We, of course, are very bias towards out own solutions.
Whether you decide to buy additional pay-per-click or do extended work using native SEO, it makes absolute sense to have your site optimized for meta-tags (a reasonably inexpensive option) and to have it submitted to several search engines every quarter. You can submit the site yourself, but again, that service is reasonably priced both from docWebTRC and from others.
Is there an advantage to using docWebTRC?
There are two advantages with docWeb's services. We only offer our services on docWeb sites. We are intimately familiar with those sites and combining that knowledge with an understanding of how your visitors navigate on your site, we can target specific pages to be more prevalent.
The second advantage is for our advanced SEO services. While it is impossible for us to guarantee search engine results, the advanced services come with the docWeb satisfaction guarantee. We accomplish this by meeting with each client to understand their business goal. Using our analysis of relevant keywords and the specifics of the practice, we only accept business where we feel strongly that the business objectives can be met. If they are not, the client's money is refunded. We don't know of anyone else in the business who makes that same offer.
The entire docWebTRC enterprise exists to help medical practitioners get more our of their eCommerce opportunities. So whether you use our services or not, you can always reach out to our experts for advise and help with SEO or any other part of your eCommerce portfolio.
What is Internet 2.0?
Try your favorite search engine for “web 2.0” and you'll find more than 8 million hits. Pretty impressive for a buzz word that has been around for a little less than 2 years. The official consortium dedicated to advancing Internet2 is being driven by academia. It is almost a rebirth of the Internet trying to apply bandwidth, next-generation technologies, middleware and security to create an advanced network that will promote collaboration and innovation.
Workshops, technology conferences, high speed optical chips, 100Gbs network segments and more are springing up everywhere. But Internet2 does not stop with universities and research centers, but like dot-everything it will have an immediate and dramatic effect on business and government.
Leaving aside network infrastructure, there are four fundamental changes in the way business, government and academia will work in a Web2.0 world. Platforms, Syndication, Collaboration and Interactivity will be the norm for websites and business of all kinds. Let's review these briefly.
Syndication: This concept has been around in a number of forms for a long time and you probably participate. Perhaps you have the daily weather come up on your browsers home page or stock quotes, this is information syndicated out to your ISP and then packaged for your home page. An even more basic kind of syndication is the various newsletters that you may be getting via your email. In a web 2.0 world, news, sports, blogs, portions of a blog or of a webstore will all be made available to you in a direct feed to your browser, media center, cell phone or PDA. In the future, for example, you could subscribe to a feed from docWebTRC news center and see every new article we post or you could the feed and get only articles that had a keyword you specified - perhaps “webcast” or “cardiologist”.
Platforms: The applications you associate with a typical PC are moving over to the Internet. Already Google, MSN and Yahoo offer versions of word processing and spreadsheet software that is free and web based. Productivity and communications software is not far behind. We recently used the Google spreadsheet to demonstrate potential savings for clients buying a YourPractice website <here> . The personal use software development changes from a single behemoth package with thousands of features to many smaller loosely joined components. Each component doing a single job pretty well. This same premise will soon apply to your backoffice software. The move of business applications to this paradigm has been labeled Web 3.0. But given that today, 79% of marketers are not integrating Web 2.0 technologies, you may have a few years left before that wave hits..
Collaboration: E-mail has become the most widely accepted form of collaboration. With endless lists of CC's, forwards and attachments, information becomes obscured and difficult to capture. Collaborative tools such as those already mentioned by Google, MSN and others approach collaboration using traditional office media. In addition, wikis, blogs, group calendars, and the elusive “folksonomy” (a tagging method that may replace the traditional directory structure you are familiar with in any Microsoft or Yahoo application) may soon become the default way for groups to communicate. Your patients will soon have these expectations.
Interactivity: Participatory blogs, forums, even our own “ask the expert” are ways of harnessing collective knowledge and making it available to more people over more mediums. There is a new standard of openness. Internet 1 applications fear the user and focus on security and prevention and the new paradigm is to trust the user. This is not to say that Web 2.0 does not have substantially better security - it does; but rather that applications are being built around the users' ability to have greater access and therefore greater participation. While we don't foresee the public blogging of someone's PHR (personal heath record) anytime soon, there may be much more demand for patients to have access and participation in the medical records you keep.
It would take us several hundred pages to go through all the impacts and our list would still be incomplete. Instead, we've chosen to highlight what our technologists feel are the most important changes that may effect the way you run your practice and then we've created many links below for those of you interested in finding out more information. We've also added specific links to our library and reference center.
Try your favorite search engine for “web 2.0” and you'll find more than 8 million hits. Pretty impressive for a buzz word that has been around for a little less than 2 years. The official consortium dedicated to advancing Internet2 is being driven by academia. It is almost a rebirth of the Internet trying to apply bandwidth, next-generation technologies, middleware and security to create an advanced network that will promote collaboration and innovation.
Workshops, technology conferences, high speed optical chips, 100Gbs network segments and more are springing up everywhere. But Internet2 does not stop with universities and research centers, but like dot-everything it will have an immediate and dramatic effect on business and government.
Leaving aside network infrastructure, there are four fundamental changes in the way business, government and academia will work in a Web2.0 world. Platforms, Syndication, Collaboration and Interactivity will be the norm for websites and business of all kinds. Let's review these briefly.
Syndication: This concept has been around in a number of forms for a long time and you probably participate. Perhaps you have the daily weather come up on your browsers home page or stock quotes, this is information syndicated out to your ISP and then packaged for your home page. An even more basic kind of syndication is the various newsletters that you may be getting via your email. In a web 2.0 world, news, sports, blogs, portions of a blog or of a webstore will all be made available to you in a direct feed to your browser, media center, cell phone or PDA. In the future, for example, you could subscribe to a feed from docWebTRC news center and see every new article we post or you could the feed and get only articles that had a keyword you specified - perhaps “webcast” or “cardiologist”.
Platforms: The applications you associate with a typical PC are moving over to the Internet. Already Google, MSN and Yahoo offer versions of word processing and spreadsheet software that is free and web based. Productivity and communications software is not far behind. We recently used the Google spreadsheet to demonstrate potential savings for clients buying a YourPractice website <here> . The personal use software development changes from a single behemoth package with thousands of features to many smaller loosely joined components. Each component doing a single job pretty well. This same premise will soon apply to your backoffice software. The move of business applications to this paradigm has been labeled Web 3.0. But given that today, 79% of marketers are not integrating Web 2.0 technologies, you may have a few years left before that wave hits..
Collaboration: E-mail has become the most widely accepted form of collaboration. With endless lists of CC's, forwards and attachments, information becomes obscured and difficult to capture. Collaborative tools such as those already mentioned by Google, MSN and others approach collaboration using traditional office media. In addition, wikis, blogs, group calendars, and the elusive “folksonomy” (a tagging method that may replace the traditional directory structure you are familiar with in any Microsoft or Yahoo application) may soon become the default way for groups to communicate. Your patients will soon have these expectations.
Interactivity: Participatory blogs, forums, even our own “ask the expert” are ways of harnessing collective knowledge and making it available to more people over more mediums. There is a new standard of openness. Internet 1 applications fear the user and focus on security and prevention and the new paradigm is to trust the user. This is not to say that Web 2.0 does not have substantially better security - it does; but rather that applications are being built around the users' ability to have greater access and therefore greater participation. While we don't foresee the public blogging of someone's PHR (personal heath record) anytime soon, there may be much more demand for patients to have access and participation in the medical records you keep.
It would take us several hundred pages to go through all the impacts and our list would still be incomplete. Instead, we've chosen to highlight what our technologists feel are the most important changes that may effect the way you run your practice and then we've created many links below for those of you interested in finding out more information. We've also added specific links to our library and reference center.
| WEB 2.0 General Interest Links | Web 2.0 Medical Practice Links |
| Tim O'Reilly - great explanation of Web2 | Excellent Article from Etelos Magazine |
| Web 2.0 application showcase | BMJ (British Medical Journal) comments |
| Web 2.0 Apps - a more user friendly page | e24 bedical billing blog |
| Wired News reviews Web 2.0 (Jan 07) | lots of little gems, but a very confused site |
| Assorted Web2.0 blogs | |