Blogging – One Year In/Out

31 Dec Blogging – One Year In/Out

Blogging (blŏg) n.

1. A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings.
2. The act of writing entries, creating materials, or maintaing a weblog.

I published my first blog post last November 20, 2006. After making my blog publicly available at the beginning of the new year, I have since been amazed to see the network effect in my own personal life. Having had alot of pent up ideas, I found that blogging became an immediate and highly effective medium from which I could communicate, share, and respond to readers I would never otherwise had the opportunity to meet. While this experience is certainly not unique, it really brought home to me the powerful professional influence the dissemination of ideas can have.

A couple of interesting statistics from the first year (made challenging by my October 31, 2007 switch to WordPress):

• 88 posts
• 18,545 visitors
• 10,103 unique visitors
• 106 different countries
• ~25,000 page views

Top articles from last year included:

1. Health 2.0 Definition
2. Adware within Health Care
3. The Canonical Representation of Health 2.0
4. The Change Agents of Health 2.0
5. Knowledge Prostitution
6. Value Driven Healthcare
7. Adam Bosworth “On Vacation”
8. New Dimension -Introducting the XHR
9. Health 2.0 Business Models
10. Healthcare FICO Score

Honorable mentions, but not enough votes due to posting later in the year:

1. HealthPlanMine: Scoring the Future
2. Genomics vs. Proteonomics: Accessorizing
3. Back in the Saddle and Ready to Ride
4. Openly Confused: Misys Seeks the Source
5. Diabetic VistA – The First Amputation

The blog has been ranked as high as 154 on the Health Care 100 blogging ranking system, as well as the blogroll of most of the prominent folks within the Health IT and health care delivery space.  I have had about 90 comments to the blog (roughly 1:1 post:comment ratio) and it has led to numerous personal and professional introductions.

So what have I learned?

Blogging is a powerful tool – it has been more effective than I ever imagined in communicating ideas, trends, and observations with a ready audience. While most folks take 2 minutes or less to read blog posts that took an hour to write, that fleeting connection can open up significant opportunities. I have also appreciated the permanence, or collective memory, it provides to me as someone trying to push the boundaries on new subject matter areas. It also saves me time from re-explaining things, both in terms of forcing my thinking (through the process of writing), but also of being able to direct someone some place for further reading.

My approach to the blog will remain the same with a target of two posts per week. Since my blog is not a summary of news, but rather a commentary on events, I spend a little more time on the thought provoking and verbally pithy blurbs.  I will continue to comment on the ideas around Health 2.0, open source, Health Plan 2.0, risk models, healthcare delivery and finance models, and general Health Reform initiatives.

Looking forward to a great 2008! Bing-batta Boom-batta Blog!