Twitter and Facebook will not replace medical blogs

"The long tail of blogging is dying" according to The Guardian: http://bit.ly/NuYon.

Yesterday I joined the Pulmonary Roundtable group on Facebook http://bit.ly/B7c0I - a continuation of Pulmonary Roundtable blog http://bit.ly/Bxtya. The original site stopped publishing in 2008 and was added to the list of "dead blogs" by GruntDoc.

I see people starting to use Facebook as a substitute platform for a blog or a personal page (AAAAI, KevinMD's fan pages) and I am not sure this is the best approach. On the very basic level, you are working for somebody else (bringing page views and AdSense dollars) on a closed platform with very limited features.


Blogging is hard, requires more involvement than micro-blogging on Twitter. Image source: Xkcd.com, Creative Commons license.


Twitter is easier than blogs. Image source: WeBlogCartoons, Creative Commons license.

In happier news, the
Medlibs Round blog carnival is alive and well with its latest edition: PubMed and Discoveries http://bit.ly/tMWy9. This edition is hosted by a med librarian at the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) who writes in her blog bio: "I am not an acronym, I am a free woman" http://bit.ly/tMWy9

Related:
How to deal with the information overload from blogs, RSS and Twitter?
Some thoughts on medical blogging vs. Twitter
Is Blogging Dead or Dying? Will Twitter Replace Blogs?
Why Do I Blog?
Why Physician Blogs Close Down?
Another blogger quits due to "blog fatigue"
Using a Blog to Build an Educational Portfolio

1 comment:

  1. I think you made a huge point here: someone who generates content in facebook, works for facebook! The same goes with twitter, I believe these tools are great for sharing new sources of information and useful links, but not to write original and quality content.
    I encourage all physicians and healthcare professionals to start blogging, your hard work belongs to you, it's an effort that eventually will pay off. This blog is a living example of it, just as MedLibLog and Science Roll.

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