This e-course aims to help you how to build a properly managed medical blog, to provide quality content; to launch blog carnivals and how to join microblogging communities.

A blog is a website with regular entries commonly organized in a reverse chronological order. Technorati defines it as a regularly updated journal published on the web. Many blogs focus on a particular topic and combine text, images, videos and links to other blogs or websites.


A blog (TechCrunch.com)

Jorn Barger was the first person to write a blog as he began posting short comments and links on his website on December 17, 1997.


The website of Jorn Barger mentioning the term "blog"

So far, only professional writers have written news stories and articles, but now anybody can start a blog for free and become a useful source of information. So far, medical journals have been the main resources of information, but now some bloggers have bigger audiences than journals.

There are several types of blogs depending on who writes it and about what subject. Types include photoblogs, videoblogs (vlogs), mobilblogs (moblogs), linkblogs, group blogs, corporate blogs, tematic blogs and personal blogs as well.


A photoblog: blog.jinkyart.com.au

Most of bloggers encourage feedback by allowing readers to leave comments which leads to a knowledge sharing and debating process; and an interactive environment where writer and reader build the content together. Even if the majority of blogs are text blogs, we know many photoblogs, videoblogs (vlogs) and audio (podcasting) blogs as well.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive entry of the list of blogging terms.

Blogs in Plain English:

Blogs provide content and express opinion on healthcare that you can never find in a medical paper. A blog is a perfect channel for making new contacts with people all over the world and is an excellent tool for career building.

Physicians use their blogs to reach out to the patients who can find all the important and relevant information about a medical practice or procedure and follow the activities of their doctor. There are physicians who let their patients schedule consultations through Google Calendar and they put a widget on their blog to make it easier for the patients to find a free date.


Google Calendar: www.google.com/calendar

To sum it up, a blog can be an interactive tool for medical professionals where they can contact with their present and future patients more efficiently. Moreover, some blog authors have made a career out of writing blogs and become professional bloggers. A good example is Arnold Kim who left his nephrology practice for blogging professionally.

Blogs make a one-way process into a collaborative networking. In this concept, we can mention Alan J Cann, the author of Science of the Invisible, who interacts his students via a blog, Twitter, Friendfeed, Seesmic and a wiki.

Technorati is currently tracking more than 100 million blogs and more than 1.5 million posts every day.

According to report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Pdf), published in July of 2006, 8% (12 million) of 147 million adult users of the Internet in the United States keep a blog, while 39% (57 million) read one. It means the number of both writers and readers of blogs is exponentially increasing.

The surveys of HealthCare Vox and iHealthBeat pointed out, 93% of medical bloggers have been blogging for less than 3 years, 52% have been blogging for less than a year. More than 8.9 million US adults reported reading health blogs on-line.

A research focusing on the medical blogosphere has recently been conducted by Ivor Kovic et al. and they published the results in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).

We approached 197 medical bloggers of English-language medical blogs which provided direct contact information, with posts published within the past month. The survey included 37 items designed to evaluate data about Internet and blogging habits, blog characteristics, blogging motivations, and, finally, the demographic data of bloggers.

Medical bloggers are highly educated and devoted blog writers, faithful to their sources and readers. Sharing practical knowledge and skills, as well as influencing the way other people think, were major motivations for blogging among our medical bloggers. Medical blogs are frequently picked up by mainstream media; thus, blogs are an important vehicle to influence medical and health policy.

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Another study belongs to Envision Solutions and focused on the healthcare blogosphere. Some interesting excerpts:

• The total US adult health blogging population stands at 13.6 million as of August 2008.
• Percentage of Anonymous Bloggers Drops Sharply.
• Health Bloggers Reporting Media Contact Increases By 45%

While the number of medical bloggers is growing rapidly, their general attitude is changing. Medical bloggers used to blog for sharing information and fun, now more and more bloggers think they could use a blog as a communication channel for patients.

Since August of 2007, blogs can be cited by peer-reviewed journals with the guidelines of The National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health:

Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to publish and share content and ideas without serious IT knowledge, and allow others to read and interact with the content. Blogs allow writers and readers to have an open interactive conversation by sharing comments and links.

Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.

Networking is good for your career and blogging is a way to meet people, a channel to share your thoughts and projects properly.

There are subgroups in the medical blogosphere as physicians, hospitals CEOs, nurses, medical students, medical librarians and health care lawyers (blawgers)‏ maintain blogs nowadays.

The number of quality medical blogs is still growing and now it's over 6-700.

Comprehensive and extended lists and rankings of the best medical blogs:

• RNCentral.com
• Brass and Ivory
• eDrugSearch.com


eDrugSearch.com


• MedBlog.nl

MedBlog.nl

How to fight the dangers

Blogging can be dangerous if bloggers are not cautious enough but we have some tools to fight the dangers efficiently. If a physician writes about case studies or case presentations, he must comply with the HIPAA rules, and should not express opinion that may embarass his employer or the patient. Anonymity and the problem of credibility always lead to concerns and the patient cannot decide which medical blog is accurate enough to read it. That is why there are tools, we will describe in details in this e-course, to ensure quality and credibility.

The Future?

Bloggers tend to turn to microblogging tools as it is much easier to update such services regularly. On Twitter, users can post SMS-like messages (containing only 140 characters) and can also receive the updates via SMS, RSS, e-mail or through an application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.


The Twitter page of the World Health Organization (twitter.com/whonews)

Friendfeed, a social aggregator, lets users share messages, videos, images, slideshows, links and any kind of media content. It provides the facility to track online activities.


The Friendfeed room of Doctors and Students (friendfeed.com/rooms/doctors)