Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

A few weeks ago, Cary Byrd, founder of edrugsearch.com unveiled the Healthcare 100, a listing of the world’s top 100 English-language healthcare blogs.  Since its introduction, response from the healthcare blogosphere has been fairly positive, with many bloggers noting the list and others trying to figure out how to rise in the rankings.  

Overall, the list has generated excellent publicity for edrugsearch.com.  It significantly raises the company’s profile and gels with its stated mission of helping consumers find excellent health-related information online.  In addition, the list demonstrates how the healthcare blogosphere has grown over the past few years.  

I contacted Byrd recently to discuss the list and his plans for the future.  His responses to questions I sent him via e-mail are below.  

And yes, for those of you wondering, HealthCareVox is on the list.  As always, I’m grateful to you, my readers, for your continued support of this blog.  And now, on to the interview.

5 Questions For Cary Byrd About The Healthcare 100  

 

 

 

 

1. Why did you decide to develop the Healthcare 100?  How does it fit in with your company's mission? 

The idea grew out of a discussion we were having about health and medical blogs, and how the community was fragmented into various niches.  While I've been gratified that the eDrugSearch Blog has enabled me to form relationships with pharma bloggers like John Mack and Jack Friday, I wanted to find a way to broaden the conversation to include physician bloggers, medical technology bloggers, EMTs, nurses and so on.   I thought a ranking system like Todd And's would be a perfect way to do that.

The mission of eDrugSearch.com is to get information out to the public so that they can make informed decisions; the Healthcare 100 is an extension of that philosophy.  I just hope that it contributes something of value to the healthcare blogosphere.

2. What has been the reaction from healthcare bloggers to the list -- positive, negative, neutral? 

It's mostly been very positive. When we launched the list on June 14, we were tracking 146 blogs.  Now, generally by bloggers submitting their own blogs to the list, we're up to over 300 blogs.  To me, that shows that we've really struck a nerve -- and that people see a need for a list like this.

The biggest criticism of the Healthcare 100 has been the initial omission of some popular blogs from the list, such as our current No. 1 blog, Random Acts of Reality. We think that's mostly been corrected at this point, but it is a work in progress and we expect to add new blogs all the time.  In fact, we have set up a submission form to make it easy.

3. How do you think the Healthcare 100 will impact the health/medical blogosphere? 

As I wrote when I unveiled the list, my hope is that the Healthcare 100 will serve to increase the influence of all health and medical blogs by making it easier for bloggers, blog readers and the media to find us and to see what a thriving corner of the blogosphere we are when viewed as a single, if diverse, community.

4. Can you talk a little bit about the criteria you use for eDrugSearch.com's ranking of health blogs? 

For the overall rankings, we use Google PageRank as a general strength rating for a Web site; Bloglines to track subscribers, because Bloglines makes subscriber figures public; and Technorati to track authority, based on inbound blog links. 

We threw in the eDrugSearch.com Points to add a little spice to the rankings.  We look at quality of writing, frequency of posts, usefulness of content, and relevance of information to the topic of healthcare.  It's all subjective, of course, but it's allowed us to check out a lot of blogs that we might not have discovered otherwise, so we're glad we included it.

5. What are your future plans for the list? 

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. ;).  Actually, we've been kicking around a lot of fun ideas -- for example, to incorporate user ratings of the Healthcare 100 blogs into the ranking algorithm.  We've also been thinking of other things we can track, measure and rank that may be of use to healthcare bloggers.  But that's all I'm saying!