Just for the record
Thursday, January 15 2009
This isn’t at all a plug for votes for my blog – thanks to the other person that did – but take a look at the Medgadget poll results so far for their “Medical Blog Awards”. (You have to click on each poll, and then click to see poll results.)
As I’m writing this, all candidates for the flagship award – Best Medical Weblog of 2008 – have received a total of 925 votes. Suddenly the medical blogosphere is looking like a very small place.
But looking at the last award on the list – Best Patient’s Blog: it has 2632 votes, nearly three times as many as the Best Medical Weblog category. Granted, most of this is driven by two blogs: Six Until Me (1232 votes) and But You Don’t Look Sick (952 votes). Still, it’s pretty clear who is the audience for medical blogs: patients. If either SUM or BYDLS were in the best medical blog category, they would be creaming the front-runner – Kevin, MD (389 votes).
In fact, there’s only one other category that seems to admit patient blogs: Literary Medical Weblog, which has 916 votes total. Of those votes, a patient blog is winning with 367. Across three of the categories, the total votes combined are less than the second-place “Best Patient’s Blog” has received: Medical Tech/Informatics Weblog: 215, Clinical Sciences: 289, Health Policy/Ethics: 317 – for a total of 821 votes.
I don’t know what criteria Medgadget uses to decide its nominations: maybe nobody nominated any patient blogs for the Best Medical Weblog category, or maybe they were excluded by definition. Still, it seems a little strange of them to background their most popular nominees. Perhaps that’s something to think about next year. Meanwhile, it is an honor just to have been nominated.
It’s just another way to gain audience and to find other interesting blogs. The fact is that none of us read all blogs for the whole year so we can’t objectively vote on one or another. We all have our favorites that we voted for. I find it reasonable that a patient blog would get more votes because there are more patients than doctors. One of the winners has about 20 authors… Only by voting on their own they would outrun us. Good for them that they have such a large audience.
I was amused by the fact that John Halamka – Geekdoctor that is running HITTS and is the CIO of a hospital is way behing the AppleQuack that offers advice on being more efficient on a Mac… Some blogs are just more popular than others, and the audience is probably different.
The nominations were very open: I just went in and posted a comment.
As far as I am concerned, I went from 30 subscribers to 45 since I was nominated, so I consider this a big success.
As far as your blog is concerned, I find it really interesting and worth reading. It offers a different view, and I feel that I have a better picture of the whole after reading about your point of view.
Thanks, Ileana. Maybe they should have separate categories for “single-author” and “multi-author” blogs. Anyway, it’s not that I’m so interested in telling them how to do their business, as I am struck by what their business says about patients in the blogosphere.
I think it’s a very interesting point…
I found your blog from that list, and laughed so hard when I read your byline. Congrats on your nomination!