I am certain there must be a million stories like this out there. Devoted Twitterer attends conference that others cannot, recaps the talks via twitter as physician/new papa/blogger/entrepreneur virtually attends the conference via twitter and can give color commentary......
Or this one: Conference presenters hamstring regular news, while blogger gets strategic advantage by not registering as a journalist. Thus scooping the press...... Well, I have now seen and appreciated both in real time.
This weekend while I was recovering and taking care of our newborn I was able to attend a conference the AAAS hosted a conference entitled "Personalized Medicine, Planning for the Future" it was a scientific freedom, responsibility and the law program......... The microblogger was Dan Vorhaus Esquire and the venue was Twitter.....I know I would have loved to watch the streaming webcast, but alas I had dirty diaper and feeding duty, so I could not get to my laptop.......which led me to the next best thing......my iPhone.
What an amazing invention that IS actually worthy of Time's invention of the Year.......
The next story is a slap down of Daniel MacArthur (Pound for pound the best genomic blogger out there) Welcome back from 2 weeks away Daniel, take your beating! Credit Science Insider
June 2, 2009
Cold Spring Harbor Wants Scientist Bloggers to Follow Media Rules
At a recent meeting at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York state, Daniel MacArthur from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom, brought into focus how fuzzy the line between journalist and scientist is becoming. In addition to reporting on genetic variation in a gene that is active in fast muscle fibers at The Biology of Genomes meeting, MacArthur wrote several on the spot blog posts covering advances discussed by the participants. Francis Collins also mentioned results on his new Web site.
A specialized Web-based news service, Genomeweb, complained. Apparently there is some rule regarding when journalists can release information. Usually they are allowed to do so AFTER the meeting.......but Daniel did it before the journalists could, thus scooping them.......As a blogger who has been sued in the past due to blogging, let me tell you.....this could be scary business..... More importantly, it raises the question about Twitter.....Is twitter a microblog? Or is it a super fast SMS txt?
You see where I am headed with this.
In order for personalized medicine to progress, we all need to be in constant contact to let the flow of new ideas move........Could we actually be legally held to restrict its flow? Personally I think blogging and twittering is not exactly journalism, but it could be......even FoxNews has a twitter feed.
So who is and who isn't a journalist.....this could get almost as tricky as internet startup companies pretending to play doctor by running tests on your DNA and reporting results as if they were actually predictive of something.........
The Sherpa Says: Have to run, patients all morning. But as you drink your coffee and look at your DTC test results and analyze your CYP1A2....think about how much more that ability to microblog at a conference will affect your life than some 1 million SNPs will.........
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