By now hopefully everybody knows that maintaining good health requires quite a lot of physical activity. But how do you keep track of your activity in a measurable way? Well a San Francisco startup called Fitbit wowed them at the Techcrunch50 conference this week with their device about the size of an old-fashioned wood clothespin that can be worn 24/7 ...

Rather coincidentally I’ve run into a couple of indicators in the past week that the meme (i.e., the idea) that life might be extended indefinitely is gaining some traction. The first was an article in Wired titled “The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding.” That leads to a series of interesting videos from the recent conference at UCLA on ...

In 2.0 Attitude my theme was the clash between traditional standards for authority and “expertise” and the much broader, populaist standards for knowledge that have emerged with web 2.0 and social media.  So an article in this week’s Technology Review titled “It’s not a revolution if nobody loses” that covers some of the same ground got my attention. Clay Shirky ...

The values and attitudes inspired by the “Web 2.0” movement of recent years are spilling into health information practices. Blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube and many other sites have supported a sense of empowerment that challenges the traditional authority of many professions. “User-generated” content and “participation” are core values of what I like to call “2.0 Attitude.” This is having a significant ...