The British Medical Association goes blogging

A important feature article on medical blogging appears in this moth’s British Medical Association News Magazine, with articles by Kevin MD from the USA, Dr Dork from Australia and by a certain Dr J. Crippen from “somewhere north of the M25”.

BMA News magazine article

Net assets
Sat, 18 Mar 2006 - Features section

For Shrinkette it is an opportunity to engage with patients, the Cheerful Oncologist likes to tell it as it is, while Barbados Butterfly likes a good rant (among other things). Welcome to the world of medical bloggers. Graham Clews (aka BMA News feature writer) asks them why they do it
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Who created the earliest blog, and when, is hotly debated among the internet fraternity. They may have existed as long ago as 1993, but the term ‘weblog’ appears to have been coined in 1997. Later shortened to ‘blog’, the phenomenon really took off in early 1999 when one of the first web pages to catalogue blogs identified 23. By the end of the year, the number had mushroomed so that the same web page had given up counting.

Now numbering hundreds of thousands, the term blog covers a cornucopia of online pages offering information, insight and interference. They need not fit any particular form, but one of the best definitions has been published by salon.com (www.salon.com). It says: ‘Weblogs, typically, are personal websites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorialising and personal asides.’

Members of the BMA can log in and read the article here. For those who are not members, a version of it can be found here.