Healthcare verticals hold a lot of promise for people seeking medical information. New startups like TauMed and Kosmix compete with tech heavyweight Microsoft’s HealthVault, while sites provided by the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic tap their resources for the public good.

Resource Shelf noted the arrival of PDRHealth.com, an outpost of Thomson Healthcare’s Physicians’ Desk Reference. Accessing the online database of the Reference generally requires a doctor to subscribe.

The value of the information available in that database now comes to the regular Internet visitor. People can sign up to receive electronic newsletters, alerts on new clinical trials, and new information about prescription drugs.

PDRHealth provides details about drugs and supplements, such as their interactions and side effects. They have indexed information on diseases and conditions, with data on the diagnosis and treatment of those.

Thomson also plans to add more health research tools to PDRHealth. The site launched with tools to help check cholesterol risks, and to find potential treatment options for conditions.

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Digg is similar, they don’t think it is spam if it comes from ABC. But, if you have access to a media outlet, you can gather up a couple anonymous sources and publish garbage that would easily make Digg’s home page.

You can think of old media as acting like directories for new media. New media is heavily reliant on old media for understanding the structure and importance of ideas. Those who know this are willing to pay a premium for the top channels. That is why Sam Zell bought The Tribune Company, News Corp. wants to buy Dow Jones, and why Thomson is buying Reuters.

I recently spoke at a well known PR firm, and on their walls they hung dozens of newspaper articles written for their clients. It is the equivalent of how an SEO might look at the top rankings they have got for their clients and their own sites.

As time passes, marketing will get more expensive, and larger businesses will continue to be able to abuse the flow of information to knock down smaller and newer competitors and competing business models while smaller players have to tell more authentic, better researched, or more emotional stories to get the same level of exposure.

If you haven’t thought much about how PR is integrated into the news, consider reading Paul Graham’s The Submarine. It will make you realize how much every successful large scale business relies on some form of spam to build their brand, create demand, thicken their margins, and keep newer players out of their business.

I got thinking about that speech I gave at that PR firm. I have no idea if they will use my tips to push good ideas, or if they will use them to push inventions that reduce quality of life or kill people. When you get as much exposure as I have been lucky enough to get you just don’t know what will happen with what you do…you can’t see the outcome, but will probably see more of what you chose to see. I generally have a strong belief in strength of humanity, but also think capitalism is shortsighted, destructive, and sleazy. So which do I chose to see as benefiting more from my existence?

The biggest reason I do not blindly support capitalism is that I think as governments and countries age their law codes and markets get so complex that it is hard to know what is real or true, especially when people are rushed, live in debt, and the leading information agents are focused on profit, personalization, automation, promoting strong biases, and blending ads into content.

The media, like all businesses, operates with some level of collusion. If you are not in their spotlight you are at a distinct disadvantage to those who are. How do we get media coverage? Well that is another post.

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I’ve ordered the Oracle 11i e-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Self-Study CD Course which is designed for the first exam (Exam #1Z0-200) in the Financials certification track. The course consists of two CD-ROM’s produced by Thomson Netg and wanted to let you know my first impressions of the course material.

I have to say that I’m quite impressed with the training material. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other material of a similar nature (from an Oracle perspective) to compare it with. However, I’ve found it to be a very good introduction to the high level concepts relating to implementation. In particular, although I’ve been implementing Oracle E-Business Suite for about 5 years now I’ve pretty much stuck to the functional side of things and I found that this provides you with a good understanding of the technical architecture and concepts. Course Topics are as follows:

Oracle 11i e-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Part 1

Oracle 11i Architecture

Shared Entities and Integration Points

Multi-Org Fundamentals

Oracle 11i System Administration

Oracle 11i e-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Part 2

Flexfields Fundamentals

Workflow Fundamentals

Alerts Fundamentals

At the end of each course topic there are self assessment questions which are helpful in determining whether you’ve learnt enough to be ready for the exam. I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending this CD based learning to anyone who wants to learn more about Oracle Financials. If you would like to ask me any further questions about the content please add your comments. BTW, I’m not prepared to burn copies of the CD for anyone so please don’t ask!!

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Richard Byrom is the founder and author of OracleAppsBlog, which documents the daily experiences and learnings of Oracle Applications Consultants and Implementors. He is also an Oracle Applications Consultant, Speaker and Author.

The first one in this series was in Manchester last week.

That workshop was very interesting indeed. I’m expecting the one on Thursday to be equally so. A post likely on both next week.

Speaking of events, Blogging 4 Business took place in London yesterday. I was due to participate as a presenter but, early last week, I had to make the uncomfortable decision to withdraw (conflicting commitments, couldn’t be in two places at once: a real collision) and let co-organizer Matthew Yeomans know. From reading the conference blog and seeing the Flickr pics, it looks like it was a pretty good event.

Two great news items to leave you with:

Amazon in the US has started a podcast. Amazon Wire is a podcast about books, music, movies, and those who create them. The first edition has just come out. (Via Todd Cochrane.)

Three UK travel agents have started blogs and one of them is also podcasting. Via Niall Cook: “Lastminute, Thomson and Cheapflights are all making pre-emptive strikes in the battle against bloggers by establishing their own staff-written blogs and encouraging customer feedback.” Thomson is the one with the podcasts, with 10 travel guides (think of Virgin Atlantic’s guides).

Light blogging until the weekend.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Maybe it isn’t time to sell Google and cry quietly into a raspberry smoothie after all.

Chirac touted Thomson’s search technology project as a challenger to Google and Yahoo; “For that, we will launch a European search engine, Quaero,” he said. Quickly thereafter interest grew dramatically in Quaero’s workings.

How to meet that challenge? Provide more information? Place a FAQ on the site? Nope. Instead, Thomson has imposed a “news blackout,” InfoWorld reported:

It doesn’t appear Quaero will reappear anytime soon, and probably not as a publicly available search engine online either. Technology behind the project has to be developed, with work on it waiting for division between project teams, the report said.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Google Scholar isn’t a post-graduate course on using search engines. Instead, it allows users to sift through the world of scholarly literature: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and all the other output of the educational community.

The search engine attempts to rank those results by relevance to the query, as it does with standard web searches. Google Scholar also extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the reference documents are not available online.

But a review at the Thomson Gale web site dismisses Google’s effort as “disappointing” and inferior to other projects like CiteSeer and eBizSearch.

“The “Googlemania” fueled by the enormous media publicity and laymen’s ecstasy rubs off on Google Scholar and makes otherwise learned people disregard reality,” says the review.

And the author goes on to complain about, well, pretty much everything about Google Scholar: browsing, search options, output options. As it praises fee-based products like Web of Science and Scopus, the article manages to point out in context what its author can’t state directly; you get what you pay for in research.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

This event is called the “Thomson Gale Free For All.”

The databases included are diverse and span many topics. The following will be available to users during this celebration: General Knowledge, Student/Homework Reference, History, Biography and Literature, and Business & Law.

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads up.

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