Internet addiction is a “clinical disorder”, says The Daily Telegraph. The newspaper quotes a leading psychiatrist who suggests that “obsessive internet use is a public health problem, which is so serious it should be officially recognised as a clinical disorder”.

The editorial which sparked this news story is a one-page opinion piece which responds to a call for work exploring the criteria for the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions. Any suggestions were to be considered by the American Psychiatric Association for inclusion in an update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders, currently known as DSM-IV.

This editorial has effectively put the case for more research into internet addiction. For any emerging clinical or policy issue, getting agreement from experts on accurate and consistent diagnostic criteria is an important first step, and this editorial will be a component of that process. It is not clear from this paper what the extent of the problem is in the UK.

Sounds odd to you? According to Becky Smith of American Association for Health Education, professionals in China now have an option to submit their manuscripts to IEJHE in Chinese. They can submit to www.journalsubmit.com, and the journal is on the AAHPERD or AAHE website.

Somehow it is a privilege for Chinese professionals to publish their research articles in an American professional journal. However, for most of them, this brings up extra work such as translation or requires a rare skill as English writing. Often, they have to rely on helps from bilingual professionals in the United States to write or rewrite for them. Now, this language barrier seems to be minimized. Professionals in the United States who have worked with their Chinese counterparts in China can also give support of letting Chinese professionals write up their researches in their language and yet publish in the United States rather than take over the first place in authorship to write an English version.

Details are yet to learn. But this is good news, for professionals in China and in the United States. Cheers!

The Warren, R.I.-based marketing research and consulting firm commissioned Eyetools to run an eye-tracking study in February with the goal of finding out how and whether on-page placement affected overall calculations of return on investment and return on ad spend (ROI and ROAS).

The study found that while an ad placed above the fold is visible to 100% of site visitors, only about 60% of them actually see it. At best, below-the-fold units are visible to roughly 70% of viewers, but only about a quarter of them actually see the ads. The ratios continue to trend downward as the ad units move from center placements to columns and spots on the far left side of the page.

Stefan Tornquist, research director at MarketingSherpa, said on-page placement is an overlooked metric when it comes to determining campaign effectiveness or ROI. It’s partly due to the fact that delivery reports (whether supplied by the publisher, the ad network or a third party) rarely indicate what percentage of the media buy was served above or below the fold.

And while media buyers may be resigned to the fact that CPM-based network buys–which often, but not always, feature remnant inventory–are typically opaque, the lack of ad placement info leaves them doubly in the dark.

“It’s give and take when it comes to ad placement,” said Alexys Ruiz, an account manager at Los Angeles-based Revolution Media. “You can purchase specific, prominent areas on a site like a leaderboard or skyscraper, but your CPM is going to be higher than if you just purchase a blanket run-of-site within a network. But I don’t think you go into it thinking that the trade-off is that people won’t see the lower-priced ads. You’re buying with the goal that your impressions will be viewed.”

Tornquist agrees. “Often, the remnant stuff is thrown in along with juicier placements,” he said. “For a million-impression deal, a sales rep might say you’ll get prime placement for 100,000 really great impressions and the other 900,000 aren’t as high-quality. But the media buyer would just as soon not pay for that remnant space.”

But Tornquist said that the display ad space might shift from a seller’s to a buyer’s market in the coming months. “We see that in other areas of on- and offline marketing that there’s a belief that there will be greater price flexibility related to the economy,” he said. “Whether that shakes out in terms of prime placement CPMs in niche markets or causes run-of-network or remnant prices to come down further remains to be seen.”

The eye-tracking study is part of MarketingSherpa’s “2008 Online Advertising Handbook + Benchmarks” report, which includes research from partners like InsightExpress for overall branding metrics, Unicast for rich media measurement, and ManiaTV for online video.

After about 20 minutes of training, people feel like they’re playing a video game but are actually mouse-clicking in the name of medical science. The free program is at http://fold.it/.

Six rural Maryland hospitals facing shortages of emergency department physicians will use an electronic monitoring system provided by Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, Del., to remotely monitor intensive care patients, the Washington Post reports. Under the Maryland eCare program — the “first of its kind in the nation,” according to the Post — a video camera and computer terminal in a patient’s room will send vital signs, test results and information about patient responsiveness to Christiana, where a physician and several nurses will view the data and photographs on high-resolution computer monitors. If the staff members in Wilmington detect a patient’s health deteriorating, they can communicate with on-site nurses to provide guidance (Greenwell, Washington Post, 4/29). There will be one physician in Wilmington per 150 patients and one nurse per 30 patients (Johnson, CQ HealthBeat, 4/28).

In an effort to increase HIV testing among young people, Verizon Wireless, CDC and University of Georgia’s New Media Institute are collaborating on a project that transmits videos featuring college couples talking about getting tested for the virus via students’ cell phones, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

According to the Journal-Constitution, the project is the result of a conversation at a journalism conference three years ago about how to use students’ cell phones for important social messages. Five teams of students from Atlanta recorded more than one dozen videos promoting testing, while Verizon donated high-tech equipment and $12,000, and CDC provided $30,000 and relevant information. The goal is to have several videos ready for release by June 27, which is National HIV Testing Day.

Kevin Fenton — director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention — said increased testing can help curb the spread of the virus, particularly because one-quarter of HIV-positive people do not know their status. “We are especially concerned about HIV and younger people,” he said, adding, “We have to make sure our messages are innovative, relevant and culturally competent. There’s no better way than to involve young people.”

1. The first thing is about your own domain. You can buy one from Internet. Googling domain service you will see tons of websites doing this business. I bought my first domain keleding.com in 2000 for about $9.00 and I still pay this amount annually. nameCrave.com was where I got my first domain. It serves my domain ever since. I use this service because it was the first I knew. I won’t say it is a good or bad one in the market but I have never had no problem with it.

So, here is what you do. You go to a domain service’s website. Search to see whether the domain name you want to have has been taken or not. If not, you can go through the registration and payment process to buy the domain name. The domain name you just bought will be kept by the domain service. It only keeps it there and waits you to tell it what Domain Name Server will be for your domain name.

2. A second step is to find a hosting service to host your website which often provides Domain Name Server address that you need to tell your domain service website, a certain amount of computer space, pre-installed basic web building software, and a connection to Internet including the allowed amount of Internet traffic.

There are many types of web hosting services varying from shared service to dedicated service, or from Linux to window, or from $4.99 to hundreds dollars per month. As a beginner you might get a shared, Linux service for $4.99-$7.99 a month. In today’s market, a shared service often provides hundreds GB hard driver space and a sufficient amount of bandwidth for basic traffic for limited number of visitors. When you are shopping for hosting service, you want to choose one which provides at least (A) cpanel (web site management software) for site management, not other types of control panel. cpanel to your website management is WebCT to your course website management. You go there to manage your email accounts, domain name(s), database and database files, installing softwares for your web pages and so on; (B) Fantastico, a software that installs pre-loaded web page building software; and (C)24/7 phone support, or online live support.

Once you have signed a web hosting service you have had a web address as Domain Name Server. You need to go back to where you bought your domain name and your domain name is kept to enter this address to tell internet where people should go when they type your domain name in a browser’s address bar.

3. Usually when you go to a website what you see depends on not only the contents of the site but also what web page building software installed. For example, today’s popular softwares include Wordpress (blog), Joomla (CMS), Drupal (CMS), Neucles (blog), B2Evolution (blog), PhpBB (forum), Gallery (album), Moodle (course management), etc. With Fantastico, you can install all or any of these software for your website.

In old days we wrote html files and uploaded the files (via FTP) to our hosting accounts as a way of building a web site. Now, database driven software become a standard. Building a website means (1)go to your control panel or cpanel; (2) click Fantastico; (3) select a web site software you like, Wordpress for example; (4) click Install. The installation process takes about several seconds. Your website now is born!

4. Mange your website. This is about how to use the software you have installed in 3. In many case you will need FTP software to transport files between your desktop computer and your web hosting account. These will be different topic from this post.

Yeeeeeeees! Dr. Glover!

Now, weeks late. With my two hands on keyboard and a twisted English dictionary aside, I am asking myself this question: Do you really have to type to post, even with an iPhone?

We have a faculty at Kent State University who drives 50-60 min each way between home and work every day. I believe besides watching on the road, looking around, listening to radio show, or picking nose/ears he must be thinking a lot too. I believe it won’t be too unusual that while thinking on the road he suddenly recalls something or comes up with an issue that he really wishes he could write it down immediately. But he cannot. He is driving.

Well, after experimenting a new service called Jott today, I have realized that you really don’t have to type or write to text something. You can do so with a phone, iPhone included, wherever there is a cell tower, even when you are driving a Motorcycle. (The term write, call, type, and post, therefore, have had new meanings when being put into Web 2.0 context.)

Jott is a web service that lets you call it using your cellular phone. It will then transcript your call into a text message and send it to an email account, a website, or a different cellular phone of your choice. Receivers will get a text message and a link to Jott website for the original voice record. I tried myself several times. Although my English accent once almost caused Dr. Kelli Brown’s heart attack (it almost did to Dr. Torabi, too), my each call to Jott was indeed transcripted correctly.

There are several web services in the market which use mobile phone as a gateway device to enter voice message. Jott probably is the only one to take the voice into text and send it to where you want it to go. (I mentioned before Utters can take your call and post your voice to a website or email account of your choice.)

The following two features are especially worth a try:

• Call Jott to say a schedule and it will post it to your Google calendar.
• Call Jott to say something and it will post to your Twitter.

I did not try long call but I believe it will be more appropriate to leave Jott short messages, and when you call you want to read directly into your phone loud enough, slow enough, and clear enough because overall it will still be a machine at the other end whom you are actually talking to.

Give it a try, Dr. Glover, using your iPhone.

This website has a page that lists 23 things (or small exercises) that you can do on the web to explore and expand your knowledge of the Internet and Web 2.0. Some popular online applications among the 23 are

2: Blogging
3: Photos & Images
4: RSS & Newsreaders
6: Tagging, Folksonomies & Technorati
7: Wikis
8: Online Applications & Tools
9: Podcasts, Video & Downloadable audio

1. Twitter Feed – This service fetches new content from your blog (or any site that supports RSS feeds ) and publishes a link in your twitter account. It will help your existing customers stay updated about news related to products they already own.

2. Tweet Scan – This is like Google for Twitter. It will solve two problems:

a) Tweet Scan is great for monitoring feedback about your product from conversations happening in the Twitter universe. And they provide RSS feeds so you’ll automatically know when people tweet about products.

b) With Tweet Scan, you can find existing customers who are already on Twitter and follow them so they come to know about your existence. Or you may search for the name of your competing products and track potential customers.

3. Twitter PollDaddy – This service lets you use Twitter for getting opinions or for asking questions through polls. Type your question with a list of potential answers and post it to your Twitter account.

So if you are nearing a product release and only one of the two features can make it to the final product, use Twitter PollDaddy service to learn from customers which of the two features they think is more important to them.

4. Twitter Response – TwitResponse lets you schedule delivery of your tweets just like the way you send emails in future.

Say if you are announcing a new product at 10 AM EST tomorrow, write a message through TwitResponse and it will automatically get published to your Twitter status exactly at the time you want. You need not be texting at the time of actual launch.

5. Quotably – This is another quintessential twitter service that makes it easy for you to follow conversations happening around your tweets. It arranges replies to all your tweets in a threaded form much like the way you see discussions on usenet groups.

6. TwitterReply – With Twitter, your customers get an alternate way to get in touch with you through public tweets or even direct messages. They may want to know the contact number of your support team or they could be looking for a manual which can they can’t locate on your website.

TwitterReply sends you an instant email whenever there’s a new tweet for you in the Twitter universe. You need it because customers contacting you through Twitter may be looking for instant answers.

Source: Most Useful Twitter Services That Can Help Your Business Grow

As its website describes: “Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox and Flock extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.” Now, you have to use it to understand what this means. However, I can list several things about Zotero that I like and that it works (it does not work everything it has promised, unn… equally well).

Zotero sits at the low right corner of your browser like your pet dog who sits in front of your backyard, with eyes closing and headers lowing. No, it isn’t sleeping or taking a Sunday afternoon nap. Its mind is totally with you who is browsing all over the internet world from pages to pages, and from Alaska to, may I say, Beijing. Now, Zotero is working as 007. The moment it smells a bibliographic type of information, whether from Google space or deep inside Ebsco database, it immediately raises a sign letting you know that it has found something interesting. If you are interested, you can click the sign which resides in your browser’s address bar to save the full citation into Zotero. If you like you can type a note, attach a file for the citation, or move along to look for more. At this moment, Zotero goes back to, unn… “sleep” and waits for next task. By the end of the day, you can export what you have saved in Zotero into a file, or just leave them their for future use. BTW, when export you can choose what citation style you like.
Screen tutorial is available at this page.

Zotero also has small applications for your Microsoft Word, or Wordpress blog.

My wishlist is that it could do a better job with Microsoft Word.

For whatever it says on its website, authorPOINT converts Powerpoint files into Flash file format. However, the best feature that I use (I have not seen other similar products can also do this for you) is its ability to convert PPS  back to PPT so you can edit it.

A side note: Existing softwares all have a deficient in dealing with audio and video components in a Powerpoint file. If you find a way to keep these multimedia components integrated when converting Powerpoint into other format or for online presentation please let me know. Thank you in advance.

1. To embed Excel xls spreadsheets: Google Docs or Zoho Sheet
2. To embed Powerpoint PPT presentations: Slideshare.net
3. To embed HTML Webpages inside a blog: Use the IFRAME tag.
4. To embed Word .doc file: Use Zoho Writer.

You can also try Scribd as it claims, “Embedding documents in webpages was never so simple”.