How to access the statistics and data

Visit a video on YouTube e.g. NHS Choices Chage4life video

If the owner of the video has chosen to make the statistics and data public you will see a link to Statistics & Data. This will reveal data such as below

However as the owner of a video you get to dig even deeper into the statistics and data. Click on the link to More Insight Statistics

This will load the screen below which gives you access to detailed reporting with adjustable time range selection. This offers a whole range of reporting tools including:

• A chart of views over time
• Demographics information about who is watching the video
• A visual color coded map showing the countries your video was viewed in
• The popularity of the video relative to those of other uploaders

The project will encourage local authorities to work with other public, private and third sector service providers to develop their capacity and commitment to engaging with young people through social networking.

The Action Learning Set is aimed at anyone interested in enabling local authorities to work with social networking sites and young people in order to encourage young people’s engagement in civic society, including: youth workers, policy officers and councillors.

Download full details and a joining form from the LGiU’s Children’s Services Network website.

I have adapted Robin’s map adding in a few more tools and changing the functional grouping. You can view it in the window below.

Alternatively you can download the mindmap in a variety of formats:

• Portable document format (3.8 MB)
• PNG format (256 KB)

Questions explored with the panelists include:

• Why do individuals and organizations blog?
• How does blogging impact the broader work of an organization?
• Are there different standards used when blogging versus other writing?
• Have blogs impacted the news business significantly?
• What kind of influence are blogs having on political and policy debates?

To find out more about the debate you can:

• watch a video
• listen to a podcast
• read a transcript

The masterclass offered a well balanced mixture of presentations, discussion and debate. Bruce, chief architect behind the Faculty masterclasses, invited me to write up the emerging issues highlighted during the discussion at the masterclass into a report. I suggested that the report production could be done collaboratively using one of the many freely available wiki tools on the web. Bruce was soon sold on the idea and with help from colleague and agent provocateur Helen Nichol, the NHS social networking wiki emerged on Wetpaint.

Within a few days most of the masterclass participants were using the wiki to read about and contribute ideas building on the issues emerging out of the workshop. After a few weeks Rowan extracted the collective input and used it to produce the faculty briefing paper “The power and perils of using social networking tools in the NHS.” The briefing paper provide some practical hints and tips for anyone in health and social care who is using or considering using social networking tools. It’s not just the quality of the collectively assemebled content that makes the briefing paper worthy of a read but the fact that it was created using one of the very tools the paper is talking about. Talk about walking the talk!

Peruse the final product

Faculty background

The NHS Faculty of Health Informatics is a UK wide Community of Practice for anyone working in the NHS, Social Care, Higher Education and the Private Sector who is passionate about using Informatics to improve health and social care. To apply for membership go to www.espace.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/community/nhs-faculty-HI/. You will be prompted to enter your eSpace log-in details or to apply for
membership when you click on this link.

The research team will be running a number of workshops and on-line events to encourage contributions and opinions from individuals and groups with experience in this field or similar fields in other industry sectors.

More details can be found at www.hoip.eu/web2health or by emailing web2health@hoip.eu for a summary of the research brief. A brief introductory presentation can be viewed at www.hoip.eu/web2health/briefing.

Our friends at the NHS Faculty of Health Informatics have established good connections with the researchers and promised to keep us informed with developments.

The site provides:

• descriptions of different types of technology
• interactive examples of where technology has been used to involve and engage people in health, and
• the benefits and potential pitfalls of using technology to engage people.

Visitors are invited to submit comments and to share examples of where technology has been successfully used to engage people in health care improvement.

There is growing interest across the NHS and the public sector more widely in finding out whether social or participatory technologies tools can help to connect with and engage people to better understand their opinions and to encourage their involvement in public service improvement.

We will keep an eye on this website and other related public sector initiatives to see if they have an impact and lead to changes in the ways the technologies are used.

The author asserts that:

While searching is still the No.1 use of the Internet in health care, social media are growing in importance as consumers’ preferred online channels for health knowledge… Within Internet social media, the most popular health site is Wikipedia, which is used by about one in five adults, followed by online forums, social networks (such as MySpace, Facebook and Second Life), video-sharing, blogs and live chat rooms.

The author cites findings from the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer which identified the steady decline of trust in traditional figures of authority, and the increase in the credibility of the “average person.” This trend coincide with the growth and increasing credibility of Internet communications that enabled access to peer opinions.

The author suggests that people go online for health-social networking:

• to see what other people using medication or receiving treatment have to say about their experiences
• to learn skills or get education that helps them manage a health condition

This certainly resonates with my own and my families experiences of seeking out information about issues affecting our health. Talking of which I’m just about to check out wikipedia to find sources of information about suggested treatments for my current ear infection!

Benefits to end users

The key benefit of Ajax for end users is they are likey to experience an increase in the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability. Put simply, Ajax achieves this by shifting a great deal of interaction to the end users computer, exchanging data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change.

This has great potential for community sites like the knowledge community, where changing information is often surrounded by feature panels and navigation elements.

Examples of Ajax use on the web

Jesse Garrett says,

How the magic works

According to Wikipedia, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. The Ajax technique uses a combination of:

• XHTML (or HTML) and CSS for marking up and styling information.
• The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations like JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
• The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in some situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server.
• XML is commonly used as the format for transfering data, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML.

Jesse Garrett, uses the diagram below to highlight the difference between the classic web application model and the Ajax model. The key to all this is user experience. Ajax cuts down on the waiting times creating a much more positive experience for end users.

Figure 1: The traditional model for web applications (left) compared to the Ajax model (right).

Connecting magic models

On a theoretical level there’s a lot in common with this approach to web development and organisational development using the Lean thinking methodology. Lean thinking is a method to help an organisation, group or project

team to improve the productivity, efficiency and quality of its
products or services. The founding principle is that no work should be
done unless it is going to create a better experience for customers. By clearly defining
value for a specific product or service from the end customer’s
perspective, all the non value activities, or waste, can be identified
and removed step by step. The Ajax technique allows the non value activities to occur ‘behind the scenes’ creating space for all the value activities in the ’shop window’.