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It’s not every day I read a story on blogging when flipping through health and science RSS feeds. The Science Blog and Science Daily have released articles discussing a study conducted at UC Irvine studying “blog readers’ online habits and experiences, as well as how they perceive their roles in blog-based communities.” Blogging and “citizen journalism” continues to be a growing phenomenon - even the federal government is taking a look at how it can better communicate using Web 2.0 style methods. Recognizing the growing phenomenon, apparently the scientific community is taking a hard look at social interaction and information consumption:

The UCI study examined in-depth the blog-reading habits of 15 participants of various ages to determine how they consume content and interact with blogs and blog writers. The research found that some readers frequently post comments, while in others “lurk,” or visit without commenting.

“With the increased popularity of blogs, various tools like Blogger and Movable Type have made writing a blog easy for a wide audience,” said Baumer, who studies informatics. “But, until the technology embraces the role of the audience, the full social potential of blogging remains untapped.

The researchers hope their work will prompt further studies about the roles of blog readers and how features such as commenting and linking create new ways to interact with authors and text.

This potential change in research approach would be similar to a shift that occurred in literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars began taking into account readers’ responses when studying literature.

“This study is really just the beginning,” said Tomlinson, an ICS professor and affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. “With the rapid expansion of online social media such as Flickr and YouTube, understanding how people consume these media will be vital to understanding their broader social impacts.”

It appears the target audience for this study is other scientists - bloggers already study and are intimately aware of how they interact with their readers; blog readers don’t care about the science behind their interaction, they just enjoy receiving RSS feeds and having the opportunity to offer feedback and participate in discussions. Perhaps among those in the social science community, the “blogging movement” represents the same sort of paradigm shift quantum mechanics wrought on the “hard science” community - there is no longer such a thing as an objective observer. Of course, atoms and quarks don’t participate in discussions about what it means to be a quark and how quarks are being denied a voice in the current elections, so there’s possibly even a more thunderous change on the horizon for social sciences - not only is there no such thing as an objective observer, but interpretations and feedback offered by the observed participants have to be factored into the study.

It’s interesting to see the blogging movement through the eyes of scientists. For example, their findings included:

• Some readers frequently post comments, while in others “lurk,” or visit without commenting.
• Readers have diverse opinions of what makes a blog a blog. Academic definitions generally refer to blogs as frequently modified Web pages with dated entries listed in reverse chronological order. But study participants identified a wide variety of characteristics in what they considered to be blogs. These included both technical aspects like RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and trackback links, as well as social aspects, including the presence of conversation or personal content.
• Regular blog reading often becomes more habitual and less content oriented. Similar to e-mail checking, blog reading can become ingrained into users’ online routine. Sometimes, even the usefulness of the blog content itself can be less vital than the activity of reading or skimming the blog to fulfill a person’s particular routine.
• The timing of a blog post is not nearly as relevant to readers as its position among the other entries. Readers are more likely to read the most recent posts at the top of the screen, and are generally less concerned with the exact age of a post. A vast majority of participants said they were not bothered when they were not able to read each and every blog post, challenging a common theory that users tend to feel overwhelmed by the need to remain constantly up to date.
• Blog readers feel a responsibility to make insightful contributions. While past research noted readers expect bloggers to deliver frequent, high-quality posts, the UCI study found readers also place pressure on themselves to produce coherent, worthwhile comments in response to good blog posts.

Sound familiar? If you read “blogs on blogging” like John Chow, this kind of information is frequently discussed. However, my guess is scientists in general don’t blog much, and their fascination and study of the semantic web is proof we are living through a major shift in social science.

If you’re interested in reading more about blogging or semantic web and informatics, here’s some good places to start:

• O’Reilly Radar
• ReadWriteWeb
• iLibrarian
• John Chow
• Dosh Dosh
• PureBlogging

With more people in the science and medicine community jumping on the semantic web bandwagon, it will be interesting to see studies like this one conducted on information consumption, social networking and how it changes our social behaviors.

Do you want your doctor blogging about your checkup? Take our poll and tell us how you feel. Do you, as a blog reader, consume more of your information online than other media? Do you simply go through a daily routine of checking RSS feeds, or do you actually read articles to stay up-to-date on current events and topics that interest you?

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It began with WebMD and similar sites - patients started trusting and turning to Internet resources for medical information. Once patients began coming to the doctor’s office prepared with Internet-based diagnoses and medicine requests, doctors started paying attention to the Internet as well. Fast-forward to the present - not only do patients frequently turn first to the Internet for medical information before calling their doctor, they are now organizing into social networks like Wellsphere, DailyStrength and iMedix. We recently learned from sources like Mashable and TechCrunch that Internet heavies like Google, Microsoft and AOL are setting up systems for storing health records. And now, doctors are apparently getting into the scene with social networks and blogs of their own.

Digg recently directed me to this story at NPR about doctors who publish blogs. Apparently, according to the article, blogs published by doctors are on the rise and many people have concerns with this development. Physicians have been discussing patient information for years in journal articles, papers and books, so what is it that makes this story sensational and important to report? Is it the larger population and wider access Internet readership enjoys over published content? The fact that self-published blog articles are published faster than print material and not subject to any oversight (beyond that the law provides, of course)? Or is it just the Internet makes any story sexy and timely? Personally, I feel the issue is about the answer to this question - is it a doctor who blogs, or a blogger who happens to practice medicine? In other words, do we hold doctors (and perhaps other professionals, such as attorneys, who deal with confidential patient information) to a higher standard than anyone else who blogs?

Patient privacy seems to top the list of concerns, and the NPR article presents both sides of the debate. One the one hand, Dr. Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist and founder of the group Patient Privacy Rights, thinks these blogs may skirt close to invading patients’ privacy rights:

“The problem with physicians blogging about patients is the danger that that person will be able to identify themselves, or that others that know them will be able to identify them,” she says.

Peel’s group worries that information about a patient’s case could be traced back to the individual and adversely affect his or her employment, health insurance or other aspects of his or her life.

“If you [are a doctor and] are unhappy with the people that you’re supposed to be serving and taking care of, you probably need therapy,” she says. “You don’t need to be venting your frustrations in a public manner like that. That’s very inappropriate and unprofessional.”

On the other hand, Dr. Robert Wachter, author of a blog called “Wachter’s World,” disagrees:

“You might say we as doctors should never be talking about experiences with our patients online or in books or in articles.”

Wachter says taken for what they are — unedited opinions, and in some cases entertainment — blogs can give readers some useful insight into the good, the bad and the ugly of the medical profession.

This seems to be a movement that is growing, despite how you feel about possibly being the semi-anonymous subject of your doctor’s blog. The NPR article points to several particular blogs published by doctors, including KevinMD, which in turn links to many more. And privacy concerns will only get worse as “gated communities” like iMedExchange, who claim to verify all community members are themselves doctors, become more popular - the assumption will be, if all the readers are doctors, why even bother sanitizing the identifying information?

How about you - do you care if your doctor is blogging about you? Let us know how you feel in the comments and poll.

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