We announced today that the Healthcare 100 now includes more than 1,000 health and medical blogs submitted by bloggers worldwide.
For those of you not familiar with the Healthcare 100, it is a directory, search engine and ranking system designed to assist individuals who are seeking health information from blogs.
Since we started the Healthcare 100 in June 2007 with just over 100 blogs, hundreds of health and medical bloggers have submitted their blogs to our directory, turning it into one of the Web’s go-to resources for health-related content. Surpassing 1,000 member blogs is a milestone not just for us, but for the community of health bloggers.
One reason I created the Healthcare 100 was to help consumers gain confidence in the value and reliability of health and medical blogs. As old-timers like me may recall, health blogs were once viewed as questionable sources of information by many people. Health professionals and the media were skeptical, and consumers weren’t sure whether they could believe the health news and information they found.
By developing ‘power rankings’ that show the relative influence of a wide range of health blogs using data from Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Alexa and other sources, we created a tool that has helped consumers identify worthwhile content they can trust.
While attending the January health blogger summit at Consumer Reports, it really struck me just how far the health and medical blogosphere has come in less than two years.
The mainstream media has now fully embraced the health blogosphere, a fact that is evident in reviewing the Healthcare 100 today. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal currently manage two of the top blogs in our rankings. When we started the Healthcare 100, few traditional journalists could be found anywhere on the list.
What’s great about this, as demonstrated at the Consumer Reports summit, is that journalists and bloggers, including doctors, patient advocates and others, are now coming together at the same table to discuss the issues and challenges facing our healthcare system. That’s good for all of us.
