New trends in social media and medicine

* There is a new trend during the last 6-10 months: Some medical blogs are adopting the Huffington Post model (or something similar) with extensive use of guest- and cross-blogging.

* 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.

* Many medical bloggers/Twitters start strong, microblog their tail off, and then disappear - doctors are not quitters - why does this happen?

* We all have an ecosystem in social media, believe or not, you're part of it.

* Twitter HTML code of your profile automatically includes several "me" variables - making it your primary home on the web - this should be "opt in". Add One Line To Your Blog - or Twitter Could Become Your Primary Identity http://bit.ly/2lFRNH

There are an exponentially increasing number of ways to "follow, tag, talk, poke, nudge" and communicate in the virtual world. The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis (see the expanded flickr image) shows most social media facets:



This "flower" of Internet communication replaces the old starfish of Web 2.0 shown below:


Social Media Starfish created by Darren Barefoot (Creative Commons license).