..and once again proves itself marginally relevant by being available to AMA member or amednews.com subscribers only. (My prior gripe about amednews.com closing to non-AMA members).
Bloggers’ Grand Rounds: The evolution of medicine’s netroots
Nicholas Genes, MD, PhD, thought it would be a good idea to collect the best of medical blogs into a weekly digest. As medical blogging has taken off, his idea has grown more popular than he had ever imagined.
By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Jan. 15, 2007.
The short history of the rapid growth of medical blogging can be seen through the progression of Nicholas Genes, MD, PhD.
In 2002, Dr. Genes discovered blogs — online diaries — for the first time. The next year, he started Blogborygmi, chronicling his life as a University of Massachusetts Medical School student. The following year, he started a “carnival,” organizing the small cadre of medical bloggers to host a weekly Grand Rounds featuring links to the best of what their niches had to offer. Dr. Genes figured there were about 50 blogs written by clinicians, with at least a dozen written by physicians.
During the last few years the number of clinician-written blogs has grown at least tenfold, boosting the popularity of Grand Rounds, which recently passed its 100th edition and has spawned specialty-specific offshoots.
And Dr. Genes isn’t even out of residency yet.
The state of medical blogging has “never been better,” said Allen …, MD, a Fort Worth, Texas, emergency physician who has been blogging as “Gruntdoc” since 2002. “When I started, there were probably about 10 medical bloggers. We knew who each other were online. [Now] every time there’s a Grand Rounds, there’s more medical bloggers I never heard of.”
Nobody knows exactly how many medical blogs there are, but it appears that those written by clinicians are the tip of the iceberg. Approximately 120,000 American adult Internet users are blogging about a specific health problem or illness, said Fard Johnmar, founder of Envision Solutions LLC. The New York-based health care marketing communications consultancy recently conducted what it calls the first global survey of health care bloggers with The Medical Blog Network.
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Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
(emphasis mine)
I shouldn’t gripe, I am one of two quoted ‘above the fold’, but still: now I get to wait about six months to read this this article.
Dr. RW says it’s a nice write-up.
