Social Media in Medicine course: Medical blogging April 12, 2011

The 2nd week fo the world’s first university course focusing on medicine and social media focused on medical blogging. Here are the links and definitions I mentioned.

• Definition of blog, post, trackback, pingback (difference between them), comment, tag.
• First blog: Jorn Barger, 1997
• Technorati statistics about the state of the entire blogosphere
• Blogs in plain English:

• Types of blogs and bloggers
• Major medical blogs as examples: Kevin, MD; Medgadget; Sixuntilme; Doctor Anonymous; Street Anatomy.
• Analyzing the results of the study of Ivor Kovic et al. (Examining the Medical Blogosphere: An Online Survey of Medical Bloggers)

• Blog carnivals and microcarnivals
• How to educate with blogs (e.g. Alan J Cann)
• Some examples such as the recent post from Sergey Brin about his genes and the posts it led to (Gene Sherpa, Scienceroll, Discovering Biology in a Digital World)
• Dangers and how to fight them: Honcode, privacy issues, HIPAA, Webicina.com, etc.
• The lesson of Dr. Flea
• Money is not everything: the Scienceblogs.com story and many more
• Why do physicians blog?

• Future? Streaming your life. E.g.: yongfook.com

In the second slideshow, I described how to start a new blog step-by-step.

• You need to answer 3 questions first before starting a blog:
• What kind of blogger will I be? (there are 7 types)
• Where should I blog? WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, etc.
• How should I blog?
• My “3 blogging rule” described what you need to become a good blogger: commitment, consistency and openness
• Shared many examples about how to build a successful medical blog.

Take-home message:

A medical blog can be a perfect channel to make new contacts, find new opportunities and share your ideas with the world.

The 2 slideshows are described in details on Webicina.com’s e-guide:

See you next week when we will talk about Twitter in Medicine and also how to keep yourself up-to-date with RSS.