It seems that the next frontier for many technology and web companies is to launch a service that lets individuals track their health stats and associated information on the web. We all have our lives on the web anyway these days, right?

Microsoft has joined Google as a company that wants to help you manage your own medical and health information with the launch of a service last week to do just that. The problem is that the confidentiality of that kind of sensitive information becomes suspect when a technology provider starts handling it instead of a medical practitioner. Well, maybe.

Do you need your own medical information stored on a website (albeit, a secure one), or would you prefer that information stay as is in the venue of your doctor's office? How could an offering like this help you as a patient?

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We received some news recently about the National Multiple Sceleorsis Society having been chosen to be one of nine global charities that Microsoft will feature in its "i'm" initiative.

It looks like Microsoft is going to contribute a portion of the advertising revenue from the i'm program to the chosen nine charities, with a minimum $100,000 donation to each of these nine groups during the first year of the program.

Microsoft's i'm initiative uses the Windows Live Messenger instant-messaging client which can be downloaded by visiting the site at the "Read" link below. The National MS Society is easily worth helping out if you have the means -- and support from Microsoft is going to help in a large way here.

[Thanks, Annie]

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With more Internet-connected citizens around the globe searching for their own medical information online, Microsoft saw that it probably needed to be better represented in that field.

As such, the world's largest software company has acquired Medstory, a privately held medical search company. Medstory will be folded into the new Health Solutions Group formed at Microsoft.

A study from October of last year concluded that eight million people in the U.S. alone go online for health information every day -- ad 53% of online health-seekers said a recent search had an impact on how they take care of themselves or someone else.

The problem that Microsoft hopes to help with this latest acquisition? 22% of survey respondents said they felt frustrated by a lack of information or an inability to find what they were looking for. There's your cur, Microsoft.

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I am a large admirer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The world's richest man -- whose company's software is allowing me to type this -- has given away billions to fight certain diseases and help global health on a scale that's hard to comprehend, let alone measure.

On that vein, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just today pledged $83.5 million to fight malaria on a global scale. The pledge will provide for better controls, vaccine research and prevention of a the disease malaria -- which kills more than a million people a year.

The Foundation -- which is the world's largest charity -- has given $765 million to fight malaria since its founding. Malaria, when looked at from a killer scale, results in the death of someone in the world every 30 seconds. Melinda Gates -- wife of Bill and co-chair of the Foundation itself -- said "The continuing toll of malaria is a moral outrage -- we would not allow it in the U.S., and we should not allow it anywhere."

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