Ves Dimov, MD, who runs Clinical Cases and Images, has identified five emerging trends in medically-focused social media. Among the five:
- Independent solo medical bloggers may be going the way of the dinosaurs... Only in this case, they are being replaced by content aggregation or group blogs.
I have noticed an increasing number of group-authored medical blogs over the last year and, of course, Scope itself is counted among those (we have 15 contributors).
There are obvious production advantages to a group-authored blog, and I also enjoy the variety of voices and interests one often finds on group blogs. Boing Boing is the very obvious, very engaging example. But let's set that aside.
Medicine is such a broad and unimaginably complex field that I almost can't imagine covering it as, if you'll pardon the expression, a sole practitioner. One author could perhaps cover one or two fields, do a very high-level survey, or rely heavily on cross posting. That, I believe, is the main reason why you'll continue to see the the rise of group medical blogs.
