Server Time

We had another short meeting last week and agreed to procure the server within the next week or so; the plan is to install the Liferay portal so we can start to get something up & running on the net and understand a little more about the issues of change control and portal integration (as well as the small matter of creating some Medys applications & Portlets. Watch this space!

Want to know about cancer?

..well if you do, I can recommend this special edition of Scientific American. It is slightly more "technical" than many would like to see but I'd say its the best introduction to what is known about cancer at the moment, and what is going on the research world to find cures. This will save a lot of hours searching for stuff in the internet. It's nice to see mention of Ralph Steinman in the piece on dendritic cells, Ralph is on the scientific review board of the Histiocytosis Research Trust, I met him once at the Nikolas Symposium, a really nice guy as well as a great scientist.

MS HealthVault

Just discovered the stuff the Microsoft are working on called healthvault. This appears to be a site and toolkit and a developer community and a whole bunch of other stuff around the idea of putting personal health data on the internet. They seem to be encouraging, in a kind of open-source-ish way, a whole new ecosystem. I expect this is some kind of response to google health and all the other things and ultimately aimed at generating money from advertising (tut, tut!) I think this is, like Google Health, a potentially good development as it is one more system that might encourage people to think it's a good idea to put health data on the internet. One guy in the blogosphere, Jon Udell (here), has done more research on healthvault than I can be bothered to do so have look at that link for more info on it. Incidentally, you can't get into it from outside the USA so that rules me out anyway!

PS - still doing more thinking than doing but all is not forgotten. :)

Update

..Not much to update yet, things are slowly happening on the corporate side (shareholder changes, new directors, bank account...) so will soon have a hosted server to play on. The WHO centile application is being specified which will be the first thing on the site. We have the latest versions of MyEclipseIDE for the development and will be finding some branding for the MediBlog site. Interesting that MyEclipse now includes some features for Portlets, about time I reckon! It's nice to see that portlet development is being recognised as serious requirement, I'm not sure how useful the specific functionality will be for us but we'll be checking it out.

Finally, Liferay are now on release 5.1 which has some very interesting new features - this does make things a bit tricky as we'll have to choose the initial platform version soon and they keep adding nice new things so fast its always tempting to wait for the next one..!

Yet mooooore Goooogle

...a final question for Reid was about LinkedIn's support for the OpenSocial API's that are co-ordinated by Google. Something else to contend with I suppose, at least this is an "Industry" initiative and not just Gooooooogle again.

Liferay have been thinking about this so we may not have to invent too much new stuff ourselves hopefully.

Linked In?

I recently set up an ID on LinkedIn after someone I know invited me to join it, then people I used to work with invited me to join their "network" too, then a couple of recruitment agencies I used used to recruit asked me to join their networks, then a couple of recruitment agents contacted me to suggest a few jobs I might want to apply for, then I heard on Radio 4 "In Business" that some companies were checking up on people via LinkedIn - i.e. they were contacting people in candidates networks and informally asking for a reference. At that point I decided to add some useful information there. I've now set up an Alumni Group for a company I used to work for and invited a few ex-colleagues to join and now have 17 people in the group after only 5 days. Several people are those I didn't actually know, its interesting how the word has spread about it.

Having spent more time on LinkedIn recently I have been impressed with how clever it is - the functionality is quite neat the way it presents you with information about your network and their activities, etc. It's also very quick - to explore how they do this I did a search on Google and as usual got distracted with some background to the company behind it. The key founder is a guy called Reid Hoffman and at the Wikpedia link there's a link to a talk he gave recently on "his thoughts on launching and growing a successful technology business". This covered some stuff directly relevant to MediBlog, one of the immediate messages that hit home was that he was not too interested in the actual revenue streams, instead the focus of a start up should be to have ideas about "placeholders" for your advertising or other revenue ideas plus:

1) How do you get your first million users?
2) How do you get to ten million users?

That is quite scary, the implication being that a start-up should plan to have capacity for 1-10 million users without necessarily have all the revenue to support it. That will require some confidence when we have to move off the initial set of hardware - we probably need to think about that one day soon.

Scalable Social Networks

Brian Chan, one of the Liferay founders is presenting at Jax 08 about how to use Liferay for scalability:

"How do I scale massively the way Facebook and MySpace do? Both Facebook and MySpace are written in scripting languages that have inherent benefits that traditional Java technology-based portals lack. The session shows how to run your own Portal without using HTTP sessions, so that a deployer can scale the same way Facebook scales with PHP and MySpace scales with ColdFusion."

Of course, Mediblog.com will be outrageously successful and all our problems will be related to scaling up to meet the demand. Well possibly. Seriously though, it would be interesting to hear this talk as I have some concerns about Java scalability vs performance following uncertain experiences with SAP Web Application Servers, sadly time & money are against a trip to Germany to hear it :(