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If you have visited Wikipedia lately, you probably have seen the appeal from Jimmy Wales to donate money. Wikipedia is the fifth largest Internet site in the world, and the only top site operating as a nonprofit. Which means they need to raise money.

Until now, I have ignored Jimmy’s pleas, taking for granted my frequent access to Wikipedia. But this Thanksgiving weekend, as I was cleaning out my home office and attempting to cull my book collection to make some room on the shelves, I realized something that convinced me to make a donation.

If you have ever tried to get rid of some of your old books, you know how hard it can be to pull the trigger.

Some books, like my copy of The Great Gatsby, one of the great novels of the 20th century, are clearly keepers even though it cost just $1.00 at the used book store back when it had an intact cover.

Others books are wrenching decisions. How can I possibly toss out the TED Book Club selection from 2009? I still haven’t read it!

Some books, on the other hand, are easy decisions, headed for the recycle bin because even the library won’t take them. I found a whole shelf of books that I haven’t touched in years. Technology books, software books, reference books.

Information storage, not stories.

I realized that one of the biggest reasons I haven’t touched these reference books in a while, and certainly haven’t bought a new one in years, is Wikipedia.

The information in Wikipedia is fresher, well-written for the most part, and far more extensive than the best reference library. So why buy books that are just information stores when Wikipedia has so much more to offer?

The footnotes on Wikipedia are one of the best parts of the service. With every article on Wikipedia you are one click away from the best bibliography on the web for any topic.

Crazy as it sounds, my kids tell me that their teachers don’t allow them to cite Wikipedia in their research papers, even though it is the first place the go for any new project. Even so, Wikipedia is an invaluable research tool for students because they can go to the footnotes and find original sources that no one argues with.

To my surprise, my kids also had contributed to Wikipedia. What might a grade school kid add to the greatest encyclopedia on the planet? Adding information about the latest MMORPG? In fact, they had corrected and added to some of the topics being taught in their classroom.

I learned first hand the rigor of the Wikipedia contribution process.

A curator aptly named the “Red Pen of Doom” had reversed most of my own additions, self-serving edits aimed at revising and correcting the history of one of my early educational video games. Why the rejection? Insufficient references.

Wikipedia’s gift to education is far more than its reference value. It is the notion of radical participation.

Kids today grow up knowing that they can be active participants in the generation and curation of knowledge. The idea that knowledge is collaborative is quite different than my experience growing up with the old Encyclopedia Brittanica. The old encyclopedias engendered the feeling that knowledge only could be generated by inaccessible experts, and never was subject to question.

The reason I’m giving $100 to Wikipedia this Thanksgiving weekend is not just because I’m thankful to Jimmy Wales in persevering with this project, which has been such a gift to the human race.

It’s also economic.

When I look at my old stale reference books that not even the public library will take off my hands, I realized that I have saved hundreds of dollars over the past few years by no longer buying quickly dated references.

Just knowing that Wikipedia exists, that everything is there, including all the references, I save money — and trees.

Wikipedia has got to be the greatest bargain of the decade. So this Thanksgiving I thought I would give a little of that back.

Keep it up, Jimmy Wales. The world needs Wikipedia to thrive!

Just behind Twitter and ahead Foursquare, Compass by Catch.com is one of the most widely installed and highly rated apps on Android. Until now it’s been under the radar.

The point of Compass is to help you find your way. Yes, it starts with a variety of actual compass designs to choose from that point North with as much accuracy as your phone’s magnetometer will allow.

The real power of Compass, however, is to make it easy to save and retrieve places that are important to you together with your geo-tagged notes.

Compass was developed by Catch.com, and it integrates seamlessly with the Catch Notes application on Android to enable you to attach notes to locations. When you take a note from Compass, the note is automatically populated with your current address and other data gathered from the phone’s sensors.

After you attach a note to a location, you can also add photos and soon a voice note.

Use Compass to annotate your world. Then when you want to find your way back to your important places and recall what you were thinking at the time, Compass points you toward them.

Compass ranks in the top 25 apps on Android, out of over 100,000 apps in the market. As of today, Compass has been downloaded over 8 million times, and is installed on nearly 5 million Android phones according to the Developer Console where Google reports Android Market data to developers. Most Android developers keep this data a secret, but we decided to let you in on how we track installs and usage of our app.

But just being installed on a phone doesn’t mean that people actually use it. That’s why we use Google Analytics Mobile to understand how many people actually use Compass and which features get used the most. Google Analytics shows aggregate usage data that cannot be linked with users. We use this summary data to help understand and prioritize our development tasks.

In December 2010, Compass had 1,762,328 Absolute Unique Visitors according to Google Analytics Mobile. This makes Compass one of the biggest location checkin apps in the world. Despite the many Compass users, the app has been under the radar because Compass helps you track your private places and notes, and there is no push to share your location or geo-tagged content as there is in most other checkin apps. No one can see your checkins and notes unless you decide to share them.

If you use Compass and you have any thoughts and ideas for the product, or if you would like to share a story about how you use it on your Android phone, please leave a comment. If you don’t have Compass, why not give it a try?

Last month, I had the chance to speak at South By Southwest 2010 — 15 minutes of fame in the Future 15 mobile track of the world’s hippest interactive conference. I was invited to talk about the Android ecosystem, where Snaptic is a leading developer with over 2 million active installs of our note-taking and geo-tagging applications. Here’s my presentation, entitled “Augmenting Your Brain With Android.”

SXSW started as a music and film festival, but has emerged as one of the biggest affairs for the Internet and new interactive technology. Since tech turned the music industry on its head and is in the process of disrupting the film business as well, it makes sense to combine tech with film and music. 2010 also was the first year SXSW had a track dedicated to mobile, which also makes sense as we enter another phase shift with the next billion connections to the internet coming through smart mobile devices.

With such powerful, always on, always connected technology in our hands around the clock, we posed the question of what this means for our brain. How can we use smart mobile technology to become smarter in managing the increased flow of information? With the flood of content generated by others people and important to other people, what is happening to the content that is most important to us?

Snaptic is developing technology to augment your brain, and we are looking to the brain for design inspiration. There are no database schemas, no tables with rows and columns, in your brain. Instead, your brain is a vast network of synaptically connected notes that grows and evolves as you capture and connect information that is important to you.

The information model for Snaptic note-taking applications is a network of interconnected elements of data, retaining and using context so that your notes make more sense and are easier to find with less effort. We have opened our notes platform to developers, making it easy to capture and connect information from any app.

We can’t do it alone, which is why we are open-sourcing more of our technology every day and inviting more developers to work with us to create a new information space designed like the brain and for the brain. Check out http://github.com/snaptic to follow our open source projects, and check out http://snaptic.com/events for information on our upcoming developer challenge and developer conference.

The panel picker for SXSW went live this morning, including our panel proposal called “Augmenting Your Brain with Smartphones and Semantic Technologies,” at the intersection of augmented reality, semantic web, mobile technologies, and brain science.

SXSW (South by Southwest) is one of the largest music festivals in the United States. In recent years, SXSW has also become a mecca for creative internet and new technology developers, entrepreneurs and designers. Augmenting Your Brain is a panel proposal for SXSW Interactive.

The next evolution of the web, the semantic web, is rapidly adding layers of intelligence to the connected information of the world. And we get to carry more and more of this intelligence around with us every day. How will that change us?

Soon we all will have two brains: one in our head and one in our pocket. At least one is getting smarter every day. How can we augment the squishy one? Learn how context-aware mobile devices connecting to semantic web services can give you ESP and new powers. Discuss how it might actually start to change our brains.

The questions that the panel will address include:

1. What are semantic web technologies?
2. What is augmented reality?
3. How can I augment my brain with technology?
4. How does context awareness change every application?
5. What is the bridge between human brains and silicon brains?
6. How will new media and semantic technology make me smarter?
7. What is brain plasticity?
8. How might semantic mobile technology change my brain?
9. What are the best use cases to illustrate the power and potential to augment our brains?
10. What happens when we connect a billion brains using mobile and semantic technology?

There are over 2200 proposals for panels for SXSW 2010, and the community vote partly determines which panels will be on the agenda at the SXSW conference. The Panel Picker is a fascinating list of ideas. This is a great way to organize a conference, with topics sourced from a very creative community of participants.

If you like the idea of Augmenting Your Brain with Smartphones and Semantic Technologies, and you would like to see this panel at SXSW 2010 or online, vote here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3253.

Thanks for your consideration, and please be sure to give this panel a Thumbs Up and leave a comment on the SXSW Panel Picker with your thoughts.

3banana Notes has been nominated as one of the best Organization & Productivity applications for the new Google Android smartphone!

3banana is a notebook that you can keep on your phone and on the web at 3banana.com. On your computer, clip stuff from the web or jot stuff down on your private 3banana page, and you also have it handy on your phone. Take a note or tag a photo on your phone, and you also have it organized on your computer. Your notebook is private, but you can selectively share and discuss pages from your 3banana notebook with your friends, like notes about books, restaurants, or wine.

3banana is free and simple to use. It functions like a private blog or private Twitter. We have been adding lots of new features to the Android smartphone app, like hashtags for organizing your ideas, barcode scanning and printing so you can connect virtual notes to physical objects, and easy sharing with Twitter and Facebook.

For a little more detail on 3banana, here’s my presentation from our launch at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference on March 17, 2009. I presented some examples of how you can use 3banana to organize information and notes around the home and attach virtual notes to objects using your own personalized scannable QR Codes, or two dimensional barcodes.

Next up, I will be speaking at CTIA, the International Association of the Wireless Telecommunications Industry, at the Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Diego, October 7-9, 2009. My talk is in the Mobile Healthcare Track. An easy to use mobile journal comes in very handy if you are tracking your health, especially when you make it less work, more useful, and easier to share with services on the web. Look for some special new features at CTIA on October 7, 2009!

Matthew Holt, the author of this presentation on Health 2.0, is the founder of The Health Care Blog and the Health 2.0 Conference, an event that has defined a new paradigm for ehealth and brings together a new generation of creative thought leaders. This year, the Health 2.0 Conference will be held jointly with the Center for Information Therapy on April 22-23, 2009 in Boston.

My Reaction to Health 2.0 and the Convergence with Information Therapy:

Health 2.0 makes Information Therapy practical and possible. Health 2.0 is about individuals creating and sharing more of themselves online in a way that improves their own health, the health of others they are connected to, and the health of the community as a whole.

Information therapy is based on the idea that what we think and believe — the content of our minds — can influence our health, either directly or through our behavior. We can change and influence the content of our minds and therefore also our health through information media.

Personalized health, however, is highly diverse, and if we had to design the right information therapy for the right person at the right time, we would never finish the job. So how does Health 2.0 make information therapy possible?

The needs in health care are complex, personalized, and ever changing. How can information therapy derived from a scripted template ever fully address them? Without Health 2.0, the greater the number and diversity of people with health needs, the more infinitely complex the situation becomes.

Health 2.0, on the other hand, changes the information therapy equation. The participants are co-creators, selectors, navigators, recommenders, and reviewers of content, so the more people involved and the greater their diversity, the more possible it is to meet an ever greater diversity of needs.

While some traditionalists might argue about the need for evidence-based information, the reality is that rich and diverse Health 2.0 communities are enabling an acceleration of evidence gathering. In the social media world, randomized controlled trials or A/B and multivariate experiments on the impact of information and ideas on user behavior are conducted every day.

This same quantitative and experimental methodology of the modern Web 2.0 Internet, when applied in Health 2.0, will start to advance our knowledge about information therapy, so that we may discover how the right information, at the right time, and in the right way can truly improve health.

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For a decade now, just about every service industry has taken for granted the benefits of information technology: Increased productivity, faster and better service, and access to services from home. All actionable information is recorded and shared electronically so that ever smarter information systems can help us anticipate and prevent problems. Whether it is retail, financial services, or even fast food, productivity in everything has gone through the roof.

Every service industry except health care, that is.

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Google Sets is an interesting new tool from Google Labs that finds associations between words or phrases and related terms that we might not have thought about. Who could be better able to offer such a tool than Google: More than any other organization on the planet, Google knows what we are thinking. When something is on our minds, chances are that a significant sample of us are typing it into Google. The resulting data puts Google in a unique position not only to identify associations between words, but also to derive insights into human intentions and behavior.

Google Sets Home Health Monitoring Example

For obvious examples, type “Porsche” and “Mercedes” into Google Sets, and the site returns Ferrari, BMW, Audi and Lamborghini, among others. Type in “brain fitness” and Google Sets returns brain health, mind fitness, mental health, stress, cognitive neuroscience, brain training, and more.

For something less obvious, I challenged Google with the name of my old company, Health Hero Network. Google Sets accurately found AMGA, the acronym for the American Medical Group Association, the company’s partner on an important but not very well known Medicare chronic care improvement demonstration project. Google Sets also identified two of the company’s competitors, Viterion Telehealthcare and AMD Telemedicine, but missed the larger rivals Philips Telehealth and Honeywell HomMed as well as Intel Digital Health, the latest entrant into the home health monitoring market. Google Sets also didn’t pick up the fact that Health Hero Network is now part of Robert Bosch GmbH.

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