Announcement: Conference on Web 2.0 in Medicine in Toronto, September 2008. What is "Apomediation"?

According to the conference website:

"Medicine 2.0™ is an international conference on Web 2.0 applications in health and medicine, organized and co-sponsored by the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the International Medical Informatics Association, the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, CHIRAD, and a number of other sponsoring organizations."

Medicine 2.0 is defined as "Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies as well as semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and facilitate specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between these user groups."

What is "apomediation"? According to this article, "traditional media intermediaries are replaced by apomediaries -- tools and peers standing by to guide consumers to trustworthy information, or adding credibility to information." The reference is provided in case some of the readers of this blog always wanted to know what apomediation was but were afraid to ask.

The deadline for abstracts is May 2nd, 2008.

The conference is organized by Gunther Eysenbach who is the Editor-in-Chief, publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and the author of the term apomediation. See his blog Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants.


A low resolution version of Medicine 2.0 map (fair use). Click here to see the full resolution image from Gunther Eysenbach's blog.

An easier on the eye version is the Social Media Starfish created by Darren Barefoot (a Creative Commons license):

The starfish also illustrates some of what I call "6 Axes of Medical Education in Web 2.0 Style":

1. Web feeds (RSS)
2. Podcasts
3. Blogs
4. Wikis
5. Custom search engines
6. Second Life virtual world

Judging by the conference web site, it looks like the term "Medicine 2.0" was registered as a trade mark... Berci Mesko who organizes the Medicine 2.0 carnival may want to look into that. Actually, I never use "Medicine 2.0" in my presentations. They are usually titled simply "Web 2.0 in Medicine" which is an attempt to solve the confusion created by terms such as eHealth, iHealth, Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Medicine 3.0, etc. I also hold the dubious distinction of first describing how physicians can use Web 2.0 in medicine on 10/29/2005 but that does not count for much anymore, I guess.


My presentation on Web 2.0 in Medicine, updated in 1/2008.

References:
Web 2.0 in Medicine. CasesBlog, 2005.
Medicine 2.0 Conference in September. eHealth.

Related:
Dangers of Web 2.0: In Medicine. ScienceRoll.com.