HealthyConcerns.com

I'm in Chicago for Consumer Health World

Consumer Health World has been incorporating a track on blogging and social media for the health care industry for the last year or so, thanks to the efforts of Trusted.MD and its leader, Dmitriy Kruglyak.

I spoke at the inaugural meeting of those two minds last year, and tomorrow I'm re-teaming with diva Toby Bloomberg and we're joined by Carol Kirschner to give a workshop on the nuts and bolts of starting a blog.

While it's clear that this blog and my participation in the medblogosphere has declined as my time has been sucked up by helping run the start-up that is BlogHer, I still have a lot to contribute around some fundamental issues that any organization starting a blog wants to learn more about, namely:

• Identifying your goals for the blog and then measuring how well you've achieved those goals
• Seeing the connection between what kind of blog you want you have, the kind of content that might dictate, and the kind of blogger you need to find
• The difference between being "Web 2.0" and fostering online community
• How and why to establish guidelines and policies for your online community

I'm looking forward to hanging with Toby and Carol and whoever shows up to join in the conversation.

The Sec'y of Health & Human Services blogs (or blogged)

And Mike Leavitt's blog proves all over again the central point blogvangelists, including me, make about blogging: Blogging has the potential to humanize...to humanize a huge corporation (a la Scoble's work at Microsoft.) To humanize those who hold different views from you. And in this case to humanize our government.

While he only committed to blog through the month of August, we'll see if he got bitten by the blogging bug. I have to say I hope so.

Recently Leavitt was in Africa, most recently in Rwanda, and he wrote long, substantive posts about both what's happening in Africa, but also his perspectives on what he saw, learned, experienced.

His latest post, about Rwanda, genocide and AIDS is very long in blog terms, but also very well-written, interesting, just personal enough.

He addresses something I've thought a lot about since attending a very high-level women's advisory board meeting in NYC in January...