Digg for Medicine: Nature Publishing Group Launches Dissect Medicine

Digg.com is a tremendous success. Webmasters dream of their pages being "dug." A news or blog story which makes it to the front page of Digg brings tens of thousands (millions?) visitors to the linked website. People vote passionately for the stories they like or dislike.

Dissect Medicine is a website of Nature Publishing Group. They first tried it out with a service called Pligg which now redirects to the new website:

"Dissect Medicine is a collaborative medical news website. Users submit stories for review but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, users do by voting for stories.

The ideas behind Dissect Medicine come from Digg.com, a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. Dissect Medicine takes this concept and adds extra features to tailor it to the needs of a medical audience."

It looks interesting. Give it a try. If nothing else, you can submit your own blog post to see what others think about it.

The real question is how many people are going to use Dissect Medicine to digg medical stories. The "wisdom of crowds" concept works when you have a crowd.

Social websites need a critical mass of users and this is one of the reasons why I am posting the link to Dissect Medicine here.

Update 4/4/2007:
David Rothman writes about 3 separate efforts to create a “Digg for medical literature”: MediNews: Digg for Medical Literature, Part IV.

Digg Song


Kina Grannis created the “Digg Song” and became an almost instant viral success, so much so that a record company has been in touch with her. Link via Dr Shock MD PhD. Song chorus:

"Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!"

References:
Digging Grand Rounds

Updated: 01/01/2008

1 comment:

  1. I've created a social bookmarking icon for Dissect Medicine here:

    http://kidneynotes.blogspot.com/2006/12/add-dissect-medicine-social-bookmarking.html

    ReplyDelete