All the Rage: Health 2.0 Web sites

May 14th, 2008

I’ve been asked to speak tonight at a friend’s poker night. But this isn’t just any poker night (nor is this just any friend) this is a local chapter of the MS Society’s guys night. So how did a gal without MS end up speaking at a multiple sclerosis event and what on earth is she speaking about? I think the answer to the first part of that question is because my friend promised a group of guys that he could bring in a girl and the second part of the answer is that I’m talking about online communities for people with multiple sclerosis.

Tonight I’ll be talking about a few health 2.0 sites that are full of good stuff.

HealthTalk.com - All bias aside this is an incredible resource. For online support check out our blogs to rally with your fellow MSers (or a good deal of other disease networks) or submit a question to our Ask the Doctor section. Download a podcast of one of our Webcasts, listen to our web stream or watch some of our videos. HealthTalk is all original content which is becoming somewhat of a rarity in the online health space.

RevolutionHealth.com - Again, there is some bias here but that doesn’t stop me from being amazed at all the community features and tools this Web site offers. I highly encourage you to check out the Community >> goals or groups features. Another cool one is their medicine chest which allows you to search a huge database of prescription meds with user reviews.

The following health 2.0 community sites(not necessarily MS related) are largely based on a blog post by ReadWriteWeb called, “Top Health 2.0 Web Apps”

• Carol.com
• Vitals.com
• DoubleCheckMD
• Disaboom
• OrganizedWisdom
• Daily Strength
• Docvia.com
• I’m Too Young For This

And finally I got to make a plug for blogs in online community. My preference is WordPress but there are all sorts of options to create a blog. Among the more popular are:

• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Typepad
• WordPress

Blogs are incredibly useful for staying in touch with friends and family. They are easy to use and provide a seemingly endless opportunity to connect with people about multiple sclerosis (who happen to be very active in the blogosphere) or any other health related or sensitive topic. Most blog tools allow you to make a blog or blog post as public or private as you wish.

I’m actually writing this post about 30 minutes before I’m supposed to head to Fremont to give this little talk so I will be updating this entry with links and any other ideas that come from the discussion with the boys.

Update: So… the meeting was in Ballard not Fremont. Yep I got lost and was late, but not too late. It was a good time. The only site that any of these guys had heard of before was HealthTalk (which was nice to hear). One other guy told me that he visited a Web site called BrainTalk which is basically a massive chat board on any given health topic. I gave a quick demo on how to sign up for a WordPress.com blog. I was surprised that some people didn’t know that WP is free (and no, I don’t work for Automattic or WordPress, I’m just a fan). During our blog discussion, my friend (who writes a successful MS blog), brought up a really good point. When you have a chronic illness like MS you hope that at some point your friends and family can talk to you without harping on how you feel. Keeping an MS (or whatever it may be) blog is a way for you to explain how you feel without having to talk about it all the time. That way friends and family who are filled with good intentions can check in on you without making it a focus of conversation when they see you face to face.

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Posted in Blogging, Blogosphere, Online community, Web 2.0, health 2.0 | No Comments »

Where did that awesome 2.0 site for “writers” go?

April 7th, 2008

So there used to be a really cool web 2.0 site for the writing community, and for the life of me I can’t remember the name of this thing! It was super cool because you could sign up and create a profile that specified how often you were supposed to write to hold you accountable to that goal. If you didn’t meet that goal then it would state on your public profile that your accountability was poor. If I remember correctly your name was listed in green when your accountability was high and in red when it was low. I LOVE this idea because I love to write but I’m really bad about holding myself accountable so I thought that this was such a clever way to give writers a push. The other really cool thing about this writing community was that you could start a story (in a similar way you start a thread) and other members of the site could collaborate on your story. I believe you would be notified in your profile that others had collaborated as well. Once someone had collaborated you had a new deadline to contribute to the story. I created a few of these “story starters” and had some pretty good collaborators contribute. It was really fun to see where people went with your idea. If you didn’t collaborate by your deadline you were publicly shunned in the community….just kidding, I think your profile turned red or something showing that you contributer creditability had gone down. The members of this writing website who had the highest accountability were posted on the homepage enticing all the members to read their stuff. I can proudly say that I was on the homepage for a short time, okay a very short time.

Man- after remembering all the cool features of this site it really is a bummer I can’t find it. I wonder if it’s still around? Part of my problem is that I can never remember all my user names for these web 2.0 sites. I should just make one user name and I know a lot of people are starting to build up comment creditability from that user name (and that’s a whole other blog topic) but I kind of hate doing that. I’m not sure why. If I could remember my user name for that site I probably could find it that way. Does anyone know of the site I’m talking about? If so, please let me know!

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Posted in Blogging, Online community, Web 2.0, Writing & Editing | No Comments »