Medblogging joining the greater blog mainstream?

For a long time it seemed like medblogging was a world of its own. In all my other travels across the blogosphere...both in online channels and in the many offline opportunities that bloggers create, medbloggers weren't really a part of the picture. Enoch Choi was perhaps the only fellow medblogger that I regularly saw at blogging events, for example. And you never saw any focus on medblogs.

That seems to be changing. Enoch is leading a medblogging meet-up at Bloggercon this weekend, and more than one medblogger is on the general conference attendee list. More than that one enterprising medblogger has actually successfully pitched a full-day medblogging conference as an adjunct to a much larger traditional conference about consumer directed health care.

Dmitriy Kruglyak is the medblogger in question, and he has moved swiftly to plan a full day of seminars featuring both medbloggers and marketers...and one medblogger/marketer (that would be me.) The conference is set for November December in Washington DC.

It's really important to remember that industries are learning about blogging...its power and potential....only slowly, but certainly surely.

I spoke last week at a panel at the national conference for the American Advertising Federation. You'd think ad folks would be well up on the blogging phenomenon. I assure you, they were not. A tiny minority blogged. A tiny minority had clients who were asking about blogs. None of them knew what RSS was. None of them had heard of perhaps the most famous blogger: Robert Scoble. This despite the fact that news of his leaving Microsoft had made the news, even the traditional news.

I gave a presentation on blogging at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Acclerator complex) last month...obviously to people way more technical than I. But not up on their blogging, no way.

So, those of us who go around presenting about blogging may feel like we need to spice things up; we may think we have given the same presentation a hundred times and everyone must know all of it by now; we may feel we should throw in more acronyms and more widgets and more bleeding edge techniques.

Save it for your presentations at Web 2.0 conferences. If you're venturing into the rest of the world you gotta keep bringing it back to real world example and plain English explanations.

I hope Dmitriy's conference will do that for the medical community...because there is a lot of value to be found in medblogs.

I will post more info when I have it.

Comments

[enoch choi]

thanks for the props! see ya this weekend...