We’ve been truly gratified by the response to the Healthcare 100. Here are a few comments from health and medical blogs:
- Health Care Law Blog: “The list includes many of the top health blogs and is well worth scanning if you are interested in what is happening in the world of health and medical blogs … Cary Byrd, founder of the company, gets points for his creation of the global ranking as a way to drive traffic and make others aware of edrugsearch.com. Good classic marketing to bloggers.”
- PharmaGossip: “Great idea Cary!”
- Medgadget: “The Medical blogosphere is a growing community of vital, insightful voices. We have an opportunity to fundamentally change the way health information is communicated. Medical blogs should be surveyed, scrutinized, categorized… but not ranked. But… If someone is going to rank them… We’re glad we’re at the top.”
- Fat Doctor: “I’m familiar with a few of those ranked 1-130. I’ll have to go see what makes the other blogs so much better than this one. Expect major changes around here as I try to move up the ranking. Or not. I’m not sure I care one bit!”
- Concepts in Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Rehab: “Although the site has a ranking system that may not be the most scientific, it does provide the reader with a chance to survey all the healthcare blogs now available. Remember, blogs are written by individuals or groups of individuals that are usually expressing an opinion about a particular topic. In the case of medical, healthcare, or scientific blogs, these have not undergone the scrunity of peer-review to help determine its contribution to the scientific literature. They, however, can be thought-provoking and challenging to our assumptions.”
- Open Medicine Blog: “eDrugSearch.com, a commericial online pharmacy, and free source of drug information for consumers, has come up with an ingenious marketing plan — it has come up with a list of the world’s Top 100 Medical blogs. Even if you don’t trust dot.com sites … you have to admit it garners attention.”
One note on OM Blog’s post: We’re not a commercial online pharmacy. We’re a search engine and community for online pharmacy consumers.
We’re going to work very hard to keep the Healthcare 100 current, comprehensive and accurate. Thank you for the many words of encouragement and support!
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Cary,
I am sure you saw my comments on Pharma Blogosphere:
“Now we have a new way to learn which [healthcare] blogs deliver the best value to readers.”
Feel free to quote that.
Consider yourself quoted!
Hi Cary,
Thank you for your openness to my questions.
It might be worthwhile to consider some brief narratives on each site based on your own evaluation. Your evaluation should take into account the Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics or something similar beyond the HON Code (which is helpful but not complete in terms of conflict of interest).
Notice that many of the top blogs in the list are dot.com sites and they are selling things, products and this issue of ethics becomes even more important in that regard. I submit this post in a spirit of open debate. best regards
Dean Giustini
OM Blog
blog.openmedicine.ca
This is an interesting effort.
I’m curious aboutyour choice of bloglines versus other services. According to feedburner, I have many more subscribers from Google Reader and “Windows RSS Platform, which I presume is IE7. Perhaps it is data availability?
I also agree with a previous poster that you should factor in the presence or absence of ads. Given your criteria, sites with ads will automatically rank higher, even if they are not better, more widely read, or even reliable.
Regardless of what you decide to do, thanks for taking the time to create this list.
Adam
Hi Adam,
Thanks for your comments.
Your assumption about Bloglines is correct; it’s a matter of data availability. Bloglines subscriber info is public, whereas a blog’s total subscribers are only made available by the choice of individual bloggers.
Good point about the ads. If I can’t come up with an automated way to address that, perhaps it can be addressed in eDrugSearch Points.
[...] the Healthcare 100 a little over a year ago, the list has grown to more than 900 blogs — with hundreds of bloggers submitting their own blogs. Many of our favorite blogs display a Healthcare 100 badge on their [...]