Relay For Life on Second Life

OK - This is fun. The American Cancer Society is hosting a Relay for Life in Second Life (SL). I found this information at the discussion boards of the SL Healthy Wiki. It's a wetpaint wiki designed to gather "information about consumer health locations and groups in Second Life, with general health education resources as well."

When I look to see who is behind this wonderful and well-organized resource, I am pleased - and not surprised to see that Namro Orman (one of the masterminds of Healthinfo Island on Second Life) is involved. Namro aka Guus van den Brekel designed the excellent search widget on this page.

As of today SL Healthy has 77 members and it looks like a great place to jump in and add your expertise if you are in Second Life and interested in health information. Other SL and health resources include:
Health and Medicine in Second Life Blog
Healthinfo Island Blog
Healthinfo Island BlogHUD

diagKNOWsis

diagKNOWsis was started by Trisha Torry after she was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. It turned out that she never had lymphoma and she found this out through her, "research, networking, and the partnership (she) established with (her) second-opinion oncologist."

Now she is about.com's expert on patient empowerment. What a cool title! There is a discussion forum associated with this of course. I was drawn into an interesting thread started by Dr. L about the state of healthcare, health insurance, and the affodability of being a dr. these days. It's an anonymous forum so whether you are a physician, patient or work at an insurance company, you can add your 2 cents.

BTW - I found out about this on CNN/health. Click on the Torrey tab for Trish's article.

Inspiration From Relay For Life

I participated in a Relay for Life last year. It's a 24 hour fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. At the time I was impressed with the structure and organization of the event. They had lots of fun activities like an egg toss, noisemaker lap, and at some point they got a bunch of men to dress up as women. Hilarity ensued. They mix this fun with ceremony and education. It's a great experience if you haven't been to one yet. I recommend going during the luminaria lap. It's quite inspiring.

If you go to their website, ACS is integrating social media applications in a very organized, structured and fun way too. For example, along with podcasts available at itunes, they have a section on recommended music for the event using playlist.com. People can add suggestions which are moderated. Something to think about if you've been holding back using social media applications because you wouldn't have enough control. ACS has the right idea here in that they are allowing participation and maintaining editorial control.

They also have an RSS feed for updates to the site. There is a blog where you can post ideas for local fundraising efforts - what worked and what didn't. The cool thing is that they don't call it a blog, it's called HowTo-Do This Fundraiser. It's true that I would call it something else, but I do give them points for leaving out the word "blog". For this site it's just jargon that doesn't need to be there.

I'll have to make a note to clean up the jargon on all of my pages...