Altmetric tracks the buzz around scholarly articles - see an example: http://bit.ly/1lF9KtR You can make a difference.
See how my blog contributed to one of highest ever scores in this journal for this article (ranked #7 of 972): Children with severe asthma have 32 times higher risk for developing COPD http://buff.ly/1oIJ3FH
Here is the blog post: Allergy Notes: What are the top 3 asthma articles for March 2014? Vote here http://bit.ly/1hjZ6Ju
The article will be included in the next edition of What Is New In Small Airways Research
http://www.worldallergy.org/small_airways_group/reviews/
The beautiful flower of Internet Conversation has lost quite a few petals since 2008 but it still works:
Don't close blog comments on your site. See how one comment changed influenza treatment: http://buff.ly/1hDJ2MN and http://buff.ly/1i5b3le
From the Guardian:
"But then a Japanese paediatrician called Keiji Hayashi left a comment that would trigger a revolution in our understanding of how evidence-based medicine should work. This wasn't in a publication, or even a letter: it was a simple online comment, posted informally underneath the Tamiflu review on the Cochrane website, almost like a blog comment.
Cochrane had summarised the data from all the trials, explained Hayashi, but its positive conclusion was driven by data from just one of the papers it cited: an industry-funded summary of 10 previous trials, led by an author called Kaiser. From these 10 trials, only two had ever been published in the scientific literature. For the remaining eight, the only available information on the methods used came from the brief summary in this secondary source, created by industry. That's not reliable enough.
This is science at its best. The Cochrane review is readily accessible online; it explains transparently the methods by which it looked for trials, and then analysed them, so any informed reader can pull the review apart, and understand where the conclusions came from. Cochrane provides an easy way for readers to raise criticisms. And, crucially, these criticisms did not fall on deaf ears. Dr Tom Jefferson is the head of the Cochrane respiratory group, and the lead author on the 2008 review. He realised immediately that he had made a mistake in blindly trusting the Kaiser data. He said so, without defensiveness, and then set about getting the information needed."
References:
CasesBlog - Medical and Health Blog: The beautiful flower of Internet conversation: how many petals do you have? http://bit.ly/1ekAt9D