I started this medical web blog in the late 2007 aiming at
“logging” my thoughts, experiences and reactions to issues affecting my daily orthopedic practice.-Bone MD
Like any other physician blogger, I was looking for better ways to communicate with fellow medical bloggers and readers. I’m still improving my skills on this fast evolving form of social media.
Needles to say, I need to evaluate my blog, its effectiveness and relevance to my readers. I know there are so many intricate (some unknown) factors affecting such goals, but this rather difficult (often painful) task would help me deliver an effective, relevant and in depth medical- surgical web blog. Bridging the gap between medical jargons and patient’s level of understanding is no easy task indeed. Communication skills, in any form, must be continually improved!
Searching an analysis tool for medical blogs in the net turned out to be a frustrating and time consuming effort. Few blog evaluating tool have made it to the top of the search engines lists. Often, these tools are limited to who can pay for its use. Luckily, there are some free, simple and effective evaluation strategy employed by pro blogging icons that we can modify to suit a Medical Blog Evaluation tool.
The first method of evaluating a blog that came into mind is the one suggested by a blogging icon and IT guru, Yugatech-“make a SWOT analysis of your blog“. Perhaps this method is familiar to management and marketing guys out there (Alex of LifeSpy) but this management tool helped analyze and improve the “business” of healthcare delivery. This simple yet effective tool can be instrumental in analyzing your blog “state” and help layout plans for future directions of any web blog.
Another method I stumbled upon while searching the net would be a modification of the BizBlogReview in evaluating a corporate blog. Fiona Torrance used this strategy to evaluate some of the top corporate blogs and made an assessment of the current status of corporate blogs abroad. This evaluation tool is a must for any blogger who is serious at improving their blogs and their “blogging effectiveness”.
Here are the questions that the BizBlogReview created:
- How many blog entries are made by the corporation/author?
- How many participants exist?
- How many comments exist?
- How many links (blogroll) are on the site?
- What search engine is used?
- Does the blog have a blog policy and liability statement?
- Who is the audience?
- What is the writing style (formal/informal)?
- What is the writing tone (personal/professional)?
- What is the blog intent from the corporate and blogger perspective?.
By modifying these evaluation tools and fitting it into a medical web blog, we can probably assess the current status of any medical web blog and help layout plans for an effective and in depth blogging style in 2008!
(Next: The Orthopedic Logbook’ s Blog Evaluation)
