Sonicko Consulting

This is first and foremost a site dedicated to Online Marketing but one thing that I would like to mention is Stanford’s Folding@Home program. Similar to what you may have read or head about SETI and using clusters of computers to distribute work Folding@Home works by spreading work onto hundreds of thousands of computers to help in part find a cure for some of the world’s worst diseases. Officially Stanford has a stated goal “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases”.  A better definition is available on their science page but to quote from it:

What happens if proteins don’t fold correctly? Diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. When proteins misfold, they can clump together (“aggregate”). These clumps can often gather in the brain, where they are believed to cause the symptoms of Mad Cow or Alzheimer’s disease.

How can you help? Essentially you download a small program and while your computer is idle Folding@Home uses it to process work units that are then uploaded back to Stanford. It works for PS3, Mac OS X, Windows, and even high end graphics cards. I have a small army of machines folding 24/7 from my graphics card in my PC to my netbook to my PS3 to my laptop. Where this is applicable is that as Online Marketers we use SEM, Social Media, SEO, etc. to promote products or services, and anything I can do to create some buzz for a very worthy program I will. Folding@Home allows you to either start folding on your own, you can join an existing team or create your own. If there is enough interest in starting an Online Marketing team I’d be happy to set one up. If there are other programs that you would like to see promoted please feel free to contact me.