Technology has exploded recently, and the ability to collect and share data is increasingly important. Indeed, informatics as a career field is growing. If you know how to use data to tell a story, then you might be well-suited for a career in informatics. Learning about informatics, and how the study of data can help society, can give you an edge.

While informatics can be useful in fields like business, sociology, politics and the arts, medical informatics is one of the fastest growing fields right now. The intersection between health care and data provides doctors and other medical professionals insight into patient care, and into various trends. Study hard, and focus on the health care aspect of informatics and you could find a good career in informatics.

If you are an informatics student, it’s important that you learn as much as you can. As is fitting for a career field rooted in technology, you can find a number of helpful resources online. As you study informatics, here are 30 useful sites for tutorials on informatics:

Information About Informatics

Use these web sites to give you a broad based understanding of informatics, and how informatics can be used in a variety of settings. Instruction in the fundamentals of informatics, and understanding what they can be used for, are important facets of being an effective informacist.

1. Open Clinical: Provides information on health care informatics. Includes tutorials on the research done using informatics, and how the field can be useful in a number of areas.
2. The Definition of Health Informatics: This helpful eHow tutorial offers background on informatics, comparisons between different types of informatics, and different theories about informatics. A great place to start.
3. Health Information Technology: Visit this resource from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for more information about informatics, and tools for better data gathering.
4. American Medical Informatics Association: Offers information about informatics, how the field can be used, and great tools for improving the quality of health care through the proper application of information.
5. American Nursing Informatics Association – Caring: Get insight into health care informatics, interesting techniques, and more.
6. Healthcare Information Management Systems Society: This global society is devoted to the use of informatics. Find tools, tutorials and hints for better health care through the application of informatics.
7. National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology: A look at health care, health services and information. A great resource for health care informatics and tutorials, as well as tools.
8. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology: You can visit this web site to learn more about different ways informatics helps medicine. While there, check out resources and tutorials.
9. Health Informatics: A great Q&A about health informatics, and why the field is important.
10. Medical Informatics Section: A great tutorial on the history of medical informatics, and the advances made in the field, as well as what it can be used for.
11. Library Informatics: This web site offers access to different papers regarding library informatics and research.

Detailed Informatics Tutorials

If you are looking for specific information on different areas of informatics, these tutorials can help you. Use them to learn how date should be recorded, analyzed and presented, as well as interpreted. Great resource for the informatics student.

12. Bioinformatics Tutorial: A helpful tutorial on bioinformatics. Students can learn more about informatics and how to better integrate information.
13. Evidence Based Medicine Information: This tutorial will help you learn more about health information and how to properly access the data you need.
14. NYU Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics: These seminars and tutorials can help you get a better understanding of informatics. Some are password protected, while others are available for all.
15. Competency Tutorials: Learn more about informatics as related to nursing. Great tutorials from the Nursing Informatics web site.
16. Online Tutorials: Use these tutorials from the Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado to learn more about informatics.
17. Clinical Information Management and Technology (CIM&T) in Healthcare (Health Informatics): This virtual classroom presentation is a great way to learn about informatics, and learn about its usages and set up information systems.
18. Healthcare Informatics: A great intro into informatics, and includes tutorials on evaluating web information.
19. Finding Health Statistics Online: Use this tutorial to find data online. It’s a great primer for beginning research, and learning to use informatics.
20. Bioinformatics Tutorials: A great resource on different areas related to bioinformatics. Use this site to get a better idea of what you can do as a student.

Health Care IT Blogs and Informatics Blogs

Because health care informatics is a career that is gaining a lot of traction, it can be helpful to read IT blogs and informatics blogs. These blogs often include helpful hints, as well as tutoring on practical uses for your knowledge of informatics.

21. Healthcare Informatics: Latest articles, headlines and tutorials on informatics in health care. A helpful and informational resource.
22. Informatics Professor: Covers different areas of health informatics. Offers different tips about informatics, as well as commentary on the latest studies, techniques and more.
23. Health Informatics Forum: It’s not exactly a blog, but it’s a great social network for informatics professionals and students. Get how-to information and be tutored by experts.
24. Meaningful Health IT News: Learn about informatics and health care IT in a way that is useful and applicable in the real world.
25. Healthcare IT News: Latest on health care information technology. A great resource for the intersection of health news and data.
26. The Healthcare IT Guy: Takes a look at issues related to health care, and other industry issues. Includes regulatory information, compliance and other helpful hints.
27. Government Health IT: A look at the latest developments in healthcare IT, and what is going on specifically related to government. A great industry blog that includes headlines, how-tos and other useful resources.
28. FierceHealthIT: Another great industry blog devoted to healthcare IT, and informatics.
29. Laboratory Informatics Blog: A great look at what’s happening in the world of lab informatics. Looks at workflow, complex harmonization, and  using to spot trends and adjust matters.
30. Legal Informatics Blog: Get a little insight and help when it comes to legal informatics. Great resource for students.

Data mining, a part of information science, is the process of extracting patterns from data, and it’s an important part of transforming that data into real information that businesses can use to streamline marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, and scientific discovery. This list of the top 50 blogs about data mining and warehousing offers ideas on how data mining works, why and how it is used, and what the resultant textual and visual patterns and relationships mean.

Data Mining and Warehousing

1. Blog by Tim Manns (data mining blog): A blog about data mining, analyzing terabyte data warehouses, SPSS Clementine, SAS Enterprise Miner and telecommunications.
2. Data Miners Blog: A place to read about topics of interest to data miners.
3. Data Mining – Blog.com: Improve your CRM marketing with data and cloud mining.
4. Data Mining et al: This blogger’s interests are focused on data mining and computational intelligence, especially on the application side with regard to renewable energies and related topics.
5. Data Mining Research: This blogger covers both research and applications in data mining.
6. Data Mining World: This blog offers ways to mine data through free internet resources.
7. Datalligence: This blog covers data mining, survey data analytics, CRM and marketing research.
8. Engineering RapLeaf: The backend blog for RapLeaf, a company that offers companies and consumers ways to track their online experiences.
9. MarkTab Data Mining: This blog is part of the larger MarkTab.Net data mining portal, which provides information on data mining in general, and Microsoft Data Mining in particular.
10. Measuring Measures: Bradford Cross is interested in maths, statistics, computer science, learning theory, network theory, information retrieval, natural language processing and engineering at scale.
11. My Data Mining Weblog: Look to this new site for a compilation of data mining news and links.
12. No Free Hunch: This is the official Kaggle blog covering Kaggle news, competition findings and other interesting data-prediction related news and info.
13. Predictive Analytics World: Predictive Analytics World, the blog, is run by Eric Siegel, Ph.D., president of Prediction Impact, Inc., and chair of the Predictive Analytics World conference.
14. The Text Frontier: This blog is about text mining, voice mining and unstructured data analysis.

Machine Learning

15. Byte Mining: Ryan Rosario blogs about data mining, machine learning, programming languages, open-source software and more.
16. Informaniac: An applied researcher at Microsoft FUSE Labs works on incorporating the latest research in machine learning and probabilistic modeling into new applications and services.
17. Learning in Vision: This graduate student focuses on machine learning, computer vision and interactions between the two.
18. Machine Learning, etc: This long-running blog (since 2005) provides technical basics from Yaroslav Bulatov.
19. Machine Learning (Theory): This is an experiment in the application of a blog to academic research in machine learning and learning theory by John Langford.
20. Machined Learnings: Paul Mineiro currently is employed at eHarmony utilizing machine learning to help people find their true love. This blog is all about data-mining love.
21. Nuit Blanche: This blog focuses on Compressed Sensing and making sense of high dimensional data.
22. SAS Programming for Data Mining Applications: This bog is all about SAS programming focusing on machine learning algorithms’ implementation.
23. Social Media, Data Mining & Machine Learning: The title of this blog says it all, with the emphasis on data mining.
24. This Number Crunching Life: “Randomness in the world with a smattering of other randomness” with an emphasis on data and machine learning.
25. Tombone’s Blog: This blog covers the philosophy of computational object recognition, scene understanding, machine learning, and musings on the future of computer vision.
26. TunedIT Data Mining Blog: TunedIT, a data mining researchers’ and practitioners’ Web site offers topics on data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence and their applications.

Data Visualization

27. Biofusion Design: Vu Nguyen is a designer and devel­oper spe­cial­iz­ing in user inter­faces and inter­ac­tion design.
28. Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social MediaData Mining and Predictive Analytics: Matthew Hurst is a technologist interested in AI, NLP, text/data mining, visualization and social media.
29. Digital Urban: This blog, written by Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith, recently was voted one of the Top 5 Web 2.0 Blogs by PC Pro Magazine.
30. Flowing Data: Nathan Yau highlights how designers, programmers, and statisticians are putting data to good use.
31. Information Aesthetics: Inspired by Lev Manovich’s definition of “information aesthetics,” this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization.
32. Juice Analytics: Juice Analytics is an expert in designing and developing information-rich applications that connect people with their data in meaningful, intuitive and productive ways.
33. Junk Charts: A popular blog that recycles “chart junk as junk art.”
34. Michal Migurski: Michal Migurski is the technology head at Stamen, a San Francisco design and development studio focused on data visualization and map-making.
35. Neoformix: Jeff Clark enjoys “discovering the patterns in the apparent chaos of real life data and exploring new techniques for communicating what I discover in a visually compelling manner.”
36. The Noisy Channel: Daniel is passionate about information retrieval and information science.

Data and Numbers, Business Intelligence

37. Business Analytics: The latest developments in data mining, predictive modeling, marketing analytics, artificial intelligence, analytics, intelligent agents, semiconductors, distributing computing, and network security.
38. CoolData Blog: This blog focuses on analytics, predictive modeling and related data information for fundraising in higher education.
39. Data Mining at Business Exchange: Business Exchange offers a wide variety of issues related to data mining on the business side.
40. Jeff Jonas: A collection of thoughts on information management and privacy in the information age.
41. JT on EDM: James Taylor is a leading expert in decision management and an independent consultant specializing in helping companies automate and improve critical decisions.
42. Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Kevin helps CEOs understand how customers interact With products, brands, and channels.
43. Life Analytics: Themos Kalafatis focuses on the practical applications of data mining, text mining and information extraction.
44. Occam’s Razor: Take a deep look at Web analytics from Avinash Kaushik’s perspective.
45. Steve Miller BI Blog: This information management blog covers all thing business intelligence.
46. The Data Doghouse: Enjoy observations on the business and technology of performance management, business intelligence and data warehousing.
47. The Data Warehouse Insider: This blog about data warehousing is provided by Oracle.
48. The Numbers Guy: The Numbers Guy examines numbers in the news, business and politics.
49. The Numerati: The Numerati looks at the explosion of digital data and the rise of the applied math gurus who use it to model and predict the behavior of shoppers, voters, patients, terrorists, and even lovers.
50. Tom H. C. Anderson — Next Gen Market Research: Tom H. C. Anderson founded Anderson Analytics in 2005 as the first full service online market research firm to leverage data and text mining with other online research techniques.

Informatics is a growing field. Professionals in this field combine skills in communication, management and computer science to work in many different industries and fields. Essentially, if you’re an informatics professional, you, by nature have to manage a lot of information and communication using technology on a day to day basis. There’s no better profession for using web applications to track data, manage data and stay organized. Here are 18 web applications we think you’ll find useful.

For Your iPhone

1. OmniFocus: This task management application allows you to create to do lists, as well as sync with documents on your desktop. This application can really help you stay organized, which is especially important if you bounce between your office and visiting clients in their homes.

2. Google Calendar: Check your Google calendar from anywhere. You never have to worry about being out of touch just because you don’t go into the office.
3. Full Screen Web Browser: Does just what it says: lets you browse in full screen.
4. Evernote: You’ll never take notes on paper again. It’s so easy to take notes on your phone and save them or file them.
5. AirSharing: A great way to share files: AirSharing allows you to mount your iPhone or iPod Touch as a wireless drive on any computer, drag and drop files and then view them on your device.
6. Bento: A personal database on the go. You can manage all your information in one spot.
7. iBlueSky: A great brainstorming application for getting ideas out of your head an into a document.
8. Analytics HD: If your responsibilities include tracking online server activity, this is the ideal app for doing that across many servers and sites. While it provides only a limited view of the total Google Analytics picture, it provides the right views; exceptional trending and stats that are necessary for quick checks and meetings.
9. Go to Meeting: If your company has a GoToMeeting account, this is an ideal app to help you keep partners and staff in sync while engaging in meetings. You can’t take control of the meeting but the audio feature works great with or without earbuds and the mic. This is the ideal app for multi-casting training content to a group of people with iPads and/or iphones.
10. PHP Cheat Sheet: Dictionary of PHP syntax. This one comes in handy for everybody sometimes.

For Your Android

11. SwiFTP: This application allows you to FTP to your phone from any machine on the internet. You’ll love being able to do quick file transfers right to your Android.
12. Wifi Buddy: Wifi Buddy is a Wifi network scanner tool. The screen shows all nearby Wi-Fi stations, the quality of their signal, and their chosen broadcast channel. This one is great for when you’re out of the office and need to work remotely.
13. Folder Organizer: This app lets you organize your apps, bookmarks, contacts and shortcuts by creating labels. You can also customize the icons for the labels that you create. You can really make your phone more organized and easier to use by taking advantage of this application.
14. Factbook: A reference app for your Android that can answer pretty much any question you can ask. Let’s say, for example, you want to know the population of Mexico. Well, with this app: just ask!
15. Informant: Use your phone to record meetings or conversations. Can be set to record in advance, so that you don’t have to do anything to activate recording at the proper time.
16. Upvise: This Android app lets you access and share business information with your team when you’re traveling.

For Your Portable USB Drive and Computer

17. Open Office: Open Office is a portable version of Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database.
18. Footnote: Footnote is a large online repository of historical documents.

With these applications and many others you’ll find out on the web, you’ll be amazed at how much more productive and organized you can be; in both your work life and your home life!

Students of Informatics can find the leading edge resources to analyze, research and create computer systems and technology online. Open Courseware is everywhere, making answers and information easily accessible to students.

1. For those in Medical and Health informatics, open courseware from colleges like MIT provide students with information on MRIs, X-Rays, Medical computing, and medical artificial intelligence. In the open courseware classes, students are taught about the technology needed to identify conditions, create models, and put medical theory into practice.
2. The intersection of computer science, information science and health care is a fascinating field, and some of the leading universities offer classes to give students a foundation in the biological aspects in addition to the technological aspects of Health Informatics. The University of Utah for example, offers an overview of Human Physiology. And, the Western Governor’s University has images and information on how the body works system by system.
3. Other background in Informatics is useful, like Global Issues in Information Technology – a course from Weber State University that teaches how information technology is used in our society, and the privacy concerns that result.
4. iTunes U is a resource you might not expect for learning about informatics, but its Graphic Design lecture series from Miami Dade College can be helpful in teaching you how to best present information.
5. The University of Edinburgh’s Informatics department offers a range of open courseware materials like 5-minute introductions to their informatics courses, and course materials including video and audio lectures. You can start learning informatics through one of the top universities in the world, and never have to leave your living room.
6. Some of the top informatics professionals in the world come from Japan. If you look at your computer, it was probably made in Japan, and for good reason. Japanese technology has been leading the way for the past decade. The Tokyo Institute of Technology offers free access to open courseware materials for users around the world. Check out their website – it’s in English – for information on courses and the “favorite lecture list” which may or may not come with an accent.

Information is vital to every aspect of work, school, and play. Keeping track of, and managing information can be quite a challenge. However, with the help of technology, it becomes quite possible to manage important information with relative ease. Specifically, web applications can be a great aid for people who need to keep track of a wide variety of informational tidbits every day.

1. Financer — This fantastic web application can help you keep track of your finances, which is a great plus.
2. Check List — This incredible web application allows you to make check lists, so you can check off tasks and stay organized.
3. Heap CRM — This CRM web application is great for businesses who need help keeping track of customer information. In today’s information age, having the tools you need to succeed will give you a leg up on the competition.
4. Noter2 Lite — Organized people use notes to help themselves stay on task. However, even the most diligent person can have so many notes that they themselves get confused. This application helps you to manage your notes.
5. Timer — Knowing how long it takes you to complete tasks can make you more effective in every facet of your life. This application allows you to track many different timers so you can improve.
6. WaldeP@y — Managing personal finances can be a challenge. However with this application you can have an overview of your budget and manage a significant amount of your financial information all in one place.
7. Goal Happy — Setting goals and achieving them is the mark of an intelligent person. This application will allow you to set many goals and you can get started on achieving them.
8. Mednet – Surgical Center Management app — For persons in the medical profession, this excellent app will allow you to keep track of a wide variety of important medical information which can significantly help your patients.
9. OnsiteTag — You can track employees on site work with this application, which makes managing easier and will probably lead to increased productivity.
10. SimpleFoodie Mobile — Shopping can be a real challenge sometimes, as well as recipe planning. This easy-to-use application takes all the burden out of your brain and puts it into an amazing web sanctum.