In September I’m headed out to the UK for a couple of conferences. One of them is an ePatient conference on the medical, ethical, and legal repercussions of blogging and microblogging experiences of illness and disease, hosted by Queens University in Belfast (conference link here).

At the conference I’ll be reporting on the impact survey of breast cancer blogs that I did back in April. I’m really looking forward to this conference, as I’ll be presenting on something that I am both passionate about, but also it is a completely new area for me. I will also get a chance to meet the amazing Marie Ennis O’Connor of Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer.

In my other world – that of educational technology – I’ve been part of a movement to improve the experience of virtual conference attendees. The idea is to give people who cannot physically attend conferences an opportunity to interact informally with people at the conference. With my partner, Maha Bali, we have started to share and expand our experiences. We report on it and blog about it at http://virtuallyconnecting.org.

One area of expansion that we are considering is into the ePatient conference area. We are wondering whether or not Virtually Connecting makes sense outside of the Educational Technology space?  Since I’ll be attending several ePatient related conferences this fall (specifically QUB ePatient, Stanford Medicine X, and Health 2.0), I figured that it might be a good place to experiment with Virtually Connecting outside of the Educational Technology area.

So, why am I telling you this? Because I’m looking for people who might want to join in on a Google Hangout on Air during any of these conferences (training provided – but you need to know that the hangouts are broadcast publicly on the Internet for anyone to see). This is a great opportunity for anyone wanting to expand their network or to have a meaningful conversation with one of the onsite hangout guest speakers. Details are still to be worked out. If you are interested, please contact me (email, twitter: @rjhogue or @vconnecting, or leave a comment below).