Pew Internet and American Life Project has released another study that puts a feather in the cap for online health. According to its April 2008, Focalyst study, Pew states that more than 1/3 of US consumers born before 1946 use the Internet and of that group more an half of those aged 62-71 are online.

Not surprisingly, one of the main ways they use the Internet is to stay in touch with family, but the other, more surprising, factor that share the top spot with family is the use of search engines, both scoring 59% for online activities. Hot on the heals of travel planning and reservations (at 41%), comes health-related information (at 39%). This speaks volumes about how seniors are actively taking charge of their own health – using sources on the Internet to learn more about health conditions, symptoms and remedies.

Leading Online Activities of US Senior Internet Users

Making this group so compelling is its attractive demographic. Those over 62 online are generally better educated and had higher incomes than seniors that are not online.

Demographic Profile of US Seniors

I would love to see a study on how and what sources these users (and other demographic groups) look for health-related information online. Do people still predominantly use Google to search for health terms? Or are consumers slowly finding their way to domain experts, such as everydayHealth.com, Healthline.com, RightHealth.com and QualityHealth.com, to name a few?

The final in my Web 2.0 series, the panel discussion titled “Adobe – RIA Applications and the Web”.

Meet the panellists:

Claude Courbois, The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc.
Carnet Williams, Sprout
William White, Yahoo!
Robert Blatt, AOL

Here’s what the session covered:

Come see, hear and talk about what some of the most innovative companies are doing with Adobe’s RIA technologies. The session will consist of demonstrations and discussion on how these new technologies will drive the web forward. Duane Nickull, Adobe Senior Evangelist, hosted the event.

I gave this session **** of 5. Lots of great examples.

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Apr 22 - 25, 2008
Here are my notes:

Carnet Williams (Sprout)

- Showed a development platform using Flash to create interactive widgets
- It has multiple components: Count Down, Slide Show, RSS Feed for dynamic content
- Can utilize web services through a SDK i.e. use polldaddy, twittr
- Then you can publish it, also can go directly into ad networks
- See Sproutbuilder
- Complete Flex application

Claude Curbois (Nasdaq)

- Put huge amount of market data up on amazon s3
- Using RIA (Air and Flex), all the Processing of rendering is done on clients computer
- Nasdaq OMX: Allows to map market data down to the milli-second
- Also check data.nasdaq.com for beta
- Plan to map news to the graph
- Took 2 people 4 months to develop

William White (Yahoo)

- With a small team of 5 they focus on flash widgets for facebook, myspace, desktop and OpenSocial and Y!OS
- Finds that flex allows them to get stuff out of the lab very quickly
- Built metrics into applications (i.e. what buttons people click on)
- Examples:
o Flash app called Easylistener (next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener )
o Facebook – MusicBlog. Gives you the top 1000 music blogs
 Built an air application for remixing blog entries
o OpenSocial App ‘Yahoo! Web Playlist’
 Built in Flex
- Find it on next.yahoo.com

Robert Love (AOL)

- Bluestring is about sharing memories
- Air application
- Can easily create entire shows overlayed with music
- Can share it and control it
- Can import from photobucket, picasa, webshots
- Can also be used for docs
- Bluestring monetized through (surprise!) advertising

And that concludes my series on Web 2.0. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my notes.

One more for the Web 2.0 Expo series. This time it’s Dave Wolf, VP of Cynergy Systems, who is speaking on the topic: Sticky Eyeballs: How User Experience Wins Market Share. Here’s a link to the Web 2.0 page outlining the purpose of the session and a bio of Dave Wolf.

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, CA, Apr 22-25, 2008

I gave this session **** of 5. It was good, I was hoping to see more examples.

Here are my notes:

Why are sticky eyeballs important?

- They stay longer, therefore, buy more (pretty fundamental and obvious)
- Passionate users create a social epidemic
- So it is about creating passionate users - make it a fun, rich experience
- People are emotional, they are complicated and we need to keep focusing on the user
- The iPhone is a great example of how a great UE is winning market share

Some mistakes

- Making bad assumptions
- Building single experiences for a variety of people (CFO versus Receiver)
- Understand what their needs are
- Understand where they are (mobile, offline, always on the network)
- Thinking that developers can build it, but you need a designer

Other insight

- Putting together a designer with a developer is like putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in one room. It just doesn’t work
- It’s about data information visualization
Work Components and Outcome of a successful UI Development Process:
- Understand Objectives
- Capture User Flow - User Flow Diagram and User Stories
- Design UI - Wireframes, Design Mocks, Detailed Stories
- Implementation - Iterative delivery with Backend Design and Development and Integration

Some Examples:

- tinyBEN (Cynergy, part of a MS design competition)
- www.museworx.com
- Brightshool ExtraNet

- Design Elements could include inline pop-ups for interaction instead of an html drop down

Next in the Web 2.0 series is my notes on Adobe - RIA Applications and the Web, a session I gave **** of 5.

Next in my Web 2.0 series, I’m covering the panel by Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, called Data Portability, Privacy and the Emergence of the Social Web.

Here’s a link to the Web 2.0 page outlining the purpose of the session and a bio of Joseph Smarr.
I gave this session ***** of 5. It was excellent – very informative and to the point. I walked away from this session with lots of great ideas.

Here are my notes:

Today

- Social web is broken: Users have to re-create account, profile, re-find friends, re-establish relationships
- Dilemma: If you build another community you build another silo with all the issues above or create a widget within another walled garden

Emerging new Technologies and ‘Standards’

- OpenID
- Microformat
- DataPortability
- Social Graph
- Jabber
- Opensocial
- OAuth

The main social building blocks

- Who I am
- Who I know
- What’s going on?

Who I am

- Create a portable, durable online identity that is available across sites
- Open ID
o Sign-up with an existing account
o Link and share your profile data between sites
o Also make it possible to leverage your credibility
o You can point multiple accounts to one opened account
- Rel=me (XFN)
o Consolidate your online identity with me-links
- Social Graph API (Google)
o See what users said about themselves

Who I know

- Build and maintain real relationships
- Contact APIs
o Find people from your current address book
o Leverage previously established relationships
- OAuth
o New technology standard that allows you to share private data between trusted sites, giving control to the user, basically how much private data they want to share from one site to another
- Friends-list portability
o Continuous discovery across multiple sites. See Flickr’s new Friend Finder. Also see Dopplr. Important for new communities !

What’s going on?

- Stay-up-to date with the people you know
- OpenSocial: Allows you to build social apps that can run anywhere
- RSS/Atom allows you to syndicate your activity to share with others. Can be combined with OAuth in order to control the flow of private data
- Jabber (XMPP) allows to real-time upstream data between sites

Outlook and opportunities

- Be an Identity Provider (i.e. Yahoo, AOL)
- Be a Content Aggregator (YouTube)
- Be a Social Graph Provider (Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook)

A Day in a Life of a User (see below)

- John checks a new site
- Using openID he can quickly start to participate
- Using a social graph provider he can quickly connect to his friends
- He adds a piece of content that gets circulated to his friends

A day in the Life of a User: Web 2.0 Expo

Conclusion

- The social web is opening up and fast!

Next in the Web 2.0 series is my notes on Sticky Eyeballs: How User Experience Wins Market Share, a session I gave *** of 5.

Whilst I’m still mulling over the panel discussion I moderated at the AltSearchEngines Get Together (I’ll post about that next week, but in the meantime David Hardtke over at Surf Canyon blogged about it yesterday), I’m at Web 2.0 Expo and thought you may be interested in my notes from some of the presentations that I’ve attended. The first in my Web 2.0 series is a panel titled: “Community Building: Good, Bad and Ugly”.

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Apr 22 - 25, 2008

Meet the panelists:

Dawn Foster (Community Manager Jive Software)
Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research)
Bob Duffy (Community Strategist at Intel for OpenPort)
Kellie Parker (Community Manager PC World & MacWorld)

Here’s what the session covered:

Online communities are being created for almost every group of people imaginable (technical and non-technical). However, it’s not a simple case of build it and they will come. Passionate communities entail considerable forethought, attention to technology, and a dose of know-how to manage the unruly.

Hear more about:
1) Techniques for building strong and productive communities.
2) Ideas for resolving community issues and getting the community back on track.
3) What to do when a community or a few community members seem beyond hope (the dark side of the force).

My score: *** of 5.

And here are my notes covering the speakers’ reflections:

The definition of Community:

- Very simple - People with common interests interacting with each other online

Why is community important?

- Getting feedback on products, services
- Building brand loyalty through two-way communication
- Not just Company-to-Customer communication

Important things to consider when creating a community:

- Build versus join
- Train your bloggers
- Key is the people, not the companies
- Company (hosting the community) is like a landlord and the critical skill set of a community manager: Passion about being part of the dialogue, be a good networker and be diplomatic.

Some challenges in building communities:

Driving traffic:
- Find the passionate people.
- Get the word out through blogs and podcasts.
- Keep in mind the goals, i.e. is it to achieve a certain goal like get someone register.
- As a community manager always be polite – appreciate any feedback.

Some tips:
- Do not over-engage with the community
- Engage them when they arrive with general ease-in questions
- Growth Momentum is in ‘external’ (customer-to-customer) and semi-private communities

Measuring the success of communities – metrics:
- Measure against a goal and objectives
- Referral links from other sites
- Increased logins from existing, number of new registrations
- Number of messages posted
- Not necessarily number of leads as an outcome but awareness building
- Number of comments being posted on topics

What’s the future of communities:

- Sharing across communities and community destinations
- For companies the number of static pages versus community driven pages will shift significantly towards community generated content
- Data portability

Next in the Web 2.0 series is my notes on Data Portability, Privacy and the Emergence of the Social Web, a session I gave ***** of 5.