davidrothman.net

Nnamdi Udezue has AGAIN shown me a social news site for medical literature that I wasn’t aware of. (Dr. Udezue is hereby invited to email me with leads absolutely any time the mood strikes.)

Unfortunately, Onexamination.com doesn’t have an ‘About’ page or a FAQ, so it is hard to tell who created it and why, but the Community features seem familiar enough- quite similar to MediNews.

The user can vote for the story or comment on it. These features, now so very common, no longer seem as appealing as they once did.

While I haven’t been shy about criticizing what I see as problems with BioWizard, I think its model will prove the most popular and lasting of these sites for two reasons:

1. BioWizard does more than the others because of its integration with PubMed, and this encourages a professional user base. Anyone, after all, can build a Pligg-based site clone that is essentially Digg for a particular subject focus. The folks behind BioWizard were smart to utilize the power of PubMed to build something a good bit more powerful.
2. BioWizard got to market first and appears to have a larger (or perhaps just much more active) user base. It’s not impossible for the others to catch up, but a casual comparison of BioWizard with any of the others reveals pretty quickly BioWizard’s unique features.

The only way BioWizard can fail, I think, is if it doesn’t promote itself effectively. The only way sites like MediNews and Onexamination.com can succeed is to differentiate themselves and offer something their competitors do not.

The feature I want:
The feature that none of these sites yet has (that I want to see) is the ability of groups of users to rank articles by votes from only members of their own group. This might be a professional association based on a medical specialty or geographic location, or a large medical practice which wants a more narrow set of co-evaluators.

Related Posts

MediNews: Digg for Medical Literature, Part IV

Dissect Medicine: Spanish and German Editions

More notes on BioWizard (Digg for Medical Literature, Part 3.5)

BioWizard Enhancements: ‘Digg for Medical Literature’ Part III (Edited)

Dissect Medicine: ‘Digg for Medical Literature’, Part II

BioWizard: The start of ‘Digg for Medical Literature’?

Like this post? Subscribe to the RSS feed!

April 6th, 2007 | Category: "Social Software", For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL