Onexamination.com (Digg for Medical Literature, Part V)
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:
- 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.
- 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’?
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April 9th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
[...] Onexamination.com (Digg for Medical Literature, Part V) (tags: onexamination review social news medicine in:rothman) [...]
April 23rd, 2007 at 6:40 am
Thank you for your interest in one of our new features – OE News, aimed at providing a ‘one stop’ search for health professionals wanting to keep up with the latest medical news. No About Us section? (check us out: http://www.onexamination.com/site/about.asp?about=2 ) We’ve been providing online medical revision for 10 years, and our News section is one of our latest developments – watch this space for more!! http://www.my.onexamination.com – free to register.
April 23rd, 2007 at 6:49 am
Hi Helen-
Thanks so much for letting me know where the “About Us” section can be found.
A link to it from the News Section might be very helpful.
May 8th, 2007 at 1:13 am
[...] Onexamination.com (Digg for Medical Literature, Part V) [...]
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:02 pm
[...] Onexamination.com (Digg for Medical Literature, Part V) [...]
August 16th, 2007 at 6:35 am
[...] Onexamination.com (Digg for Medical Literature, Part V) [...]