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Wiki to support debate on using social networking tools in the NHS

Rowan Purdy — Sat, 24 May 2008 20:51:51 +0000

Following the recent NHS Faculty of Health Informatics meeting on Social Networking in the NHS, a wiki has been set up to ensure that everyone can contribute to a discussion paper on “The powers and the perils of using Social Networking tools in the NHS”.

The NHS Faculty of Health Informatics masterclass entitled: “The powers and the perils of using Social Networking tools in the NHS” was held on 15th May 2008 at the British Library in London.

The wiki can be accessed at http://nhssocialnetworking.wetpaint.com and is open to anyone who has something to contribute about this interesting area.

Having co-facilitated the original masterclass, Rowan Purdy, senior consultant at Surepoint, has been commissioned to edit the final discussion paper. We will publish it here soon.

What to do with wikipedia?

Rowan Purdy — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:40:04 +0000

A recent article by William Badke, published in Information Today (March 2008), entitled “What to do with wikipedia?“ challenges the oft quoted antipathy in academic circles towards the online encyclopedia wikipedia.

Badke says

Often banned by professors, panned by traditional reference book publishers, and embraced by just about everyone else, Wikipedia marches on like a great beast, growing larger and more commanding every day. With no paid editors and written by almost anyone, it shouldn’t have succeeded, but it has. In fact, it’s now emerged as the No. 1 go-to information source in the world. It’s used not only by the great unwashed but also by many educated people as well.

Badke recognises that there are denouncers and enthusiasts camped on opposite sites of this social information divide. He urges us to move beyond the impasse by:

encouraging the denouncers from the academic community to embrace wikipedia, improve it and connect it into other digital resources
promoting greater information literacy so that people are better able to evaluate information they find on wikipedia and the wikipedia enthusiasts consult other sources to verify the information they are finding

Blogging to confluence

Rowan Purdy — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:12:00 +0000

Do you use confluence wiki and a blogging application outside of confluence? If so, you may be interested to know that Atlassian, the manufacturers of confluence, have been working to enable 3rd party blogging applications to be used to post and edit blog posts on a Confluence server.

Types of blogging applications

There are many free blogging applications – some are web-hosted solutions like [blogger] others are client based solutions like [MarsEdit] or [Ecto]. I use the latter as it enables me to read from and draft posts to many blog locations offline, for instance when I am travelling. In fact I wrote this post using Ecto on the train and now I am back online I can send it direct to confluence without actually going to confluence.

How does it work?

Confluence makes use of the [Blogging RPC Plugin] which implements the Blogger 1.0 [Application Programming Interface] (API) and the MetaWeblog API for Confluence. This let you post Confluence news pages from any client that implements these APIs.

How can I set up my blogging client?

There are instructions for various blog clients, including:

Are there any pitfalls?

Yes you need to use write your post in standard wiki-markup, it will all be translated normally when posted, including macros. Note, however, that your blog client will not be able to interpret the markup and will present it as plain text.