Comments on: Doc2doc: Community Site from BMJ Group

By: Raju

Raju — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:19:37 +0000

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By: Luisa

Luisa — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:49:13 +0000

It’s interesting to see comments on doc2doc because we’re still testing it and its not quite ready. We had a lot of debate at the BMJ Group about launching a community and how we should do it. Jon’s comment that we should have attached the community to our products so it was back end is something we are still talking about. But we felt that commenting on content doesn’t really make a community and we’re not sure how much comment research papers etc really generate. We spoke to the Times Educational Supplement which has a community of over 500 000 teachers in the UK and they didn’t start by linking the community to their content.
We definitely didn’t do it just because there’s technology that can do it. We talked to lots of doctors before we started and they said they wanted to ask other doctors questions, know how they were dealing with the same things that they were dealing with and to find people they knew or wanted to know as “experts.” So we went for the approach Kirsti talks about- one that encourages doctors to talk to and find each other.
We’d appreciate any other comments.

By: webdesign romania

webdesign romania — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:24:13 +0000

Sermo appears to be the biggest social network site (albeit in the USA) and that doesn’t appear to have made a significant impact.

By: kirsti

kirsti — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:07:36 +0000

We have a collaboration based community for surgeons, which does very similar things except it doesn’t have their own blogs. As a specific, dedicated community, I think there is more genuine interaction around cases, clinical trials and just maintaining connections with peers. The more vast social networks are just that – vast…..and without some specific purpose, I wonder what would drive docs to join them??

By: Jon Brassey

Jon Brassey — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:59:19 +0000

I tend to agree, nothing new and I’m finding all these specific web 2.0 projects yawn-inspiring.

For these things to have any chance they need critical mass and it’ll be a struggle (although the BMJ name should help). Sermo appears to be the biggest social network site (albeit in the USA) and that doesn’t appear to have made a significant impact.

‘Innovations’ such as doc2doc are technology-led projects (as opposed to user led) and will suffer as a result.

I think they’d have been much better off integrating web 2.0 offering into the core BMJ PG outputs (BMJ, Clinical Evidence etc) and having something like doc2doc, not as front-end but back-end. I doubt it’d take much imagination to integrate doc2doc with a BMJ article…