Posts Tagged ‘stack overflow’

Failure to Launch: Healthcare IT Q&A

Monday, July 19th, 2010

It seems like a great concept (to me anyway). Grow a community of like-minded Healthcare IT geeks that want to participate in an on-line Q&A site which rewards contribution and facilitates constructive dialog. As of today, it appears unlikely this will happen anytime soon.

Even after being endorsed on HISTalk News 6/25/10 less than 900 people have visited the site.

The attraction that programmers have for Stack Overflow just doesn't translate for this group of professionals. I suppose it's the nature of the business.

  1. Programming, like Food and Cooking, have a much larger audience. Since only a small percentage of the interested population will actively participate or become community leaders, the numbers game is critical.
  2. Even though Healthcare IT seems like a broad topic, the number of non-subjective questions that could be asked is probably fairly limited.  The .NET Framework and bread recipes have tons of facts.
  3. Maybe HIT experts are a shy bunch?  The activity level also seems surprising low on Chris Paton's Health Informatics Forum site which has over 4000 members.

Anyway, it's really too bad there isn't a way for a site like this to gain traction. It would be a valuable HIT resource if it could get off the ground.

Is Google a Monopoly? Just ask Stack Overflow (and me).

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

Today's New York Times Digital Domain: Everyone Loves Google, Unitl It's Too Big quotes Jeff Atwood, probably based on this post: The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture.

It's interesting that they picked Stack Overflow as an example because even Jeff says:

Now, I don't claim that Stack Overflow is representative of every site on the internet -- obviously it isn't.

I don't know Jeff, I think you're being too modest. This blog doesn't have near the number of visits that SO does, but 95.87% of the search traffic for the last month was  from Google.  Based on an N of 2 then, I'd say that Google does have a monopoly on Internet searching!

UPDATE (3/5/09):

Is Google an Orwellian nightmare? Yes, Google Is Getting Too Big For Its Britches - Case In Point: Google Health. I'm not so sure. Linking Google's search dominance and the intended use of Google Health in some sort of surveillance conspiracy is a bit of a stretch.  If they were related, it would probably just be a clever way to increase ad revenue.  It is interesting that many people have a Big Brother fear reaction to the collection of any personal information. Personally BB doesn't worry me nearly as much as all the little thieves out there that would steal my information for their own benefit, at my expense.