When I was at Physicians' Online from 1995 through 1997, I was responsible for adding two of the most used features to the then leading online service for physicians -- e-mail and discussion boards. You have to remember, this was at the "dawn" of the World Wide Web. Before 1995, POL was on what was then known as a "graphical bulletin board system" called, of all things, Coconut. In other words, we had to send out our own connection and rendering software (a la AOL) on a disk and hope that folks could install it and get connected.
Even back then, however, influenced by my early experiences on Compuserve and AOL, I was convinced that the "killer app" was not content, but community. The ability for people of like minds to get together and communicate freely. (I know, this does not sound like brain surgery, but there are still people out there that will tell you that community was overrated. Having seen one develop firsthand, I heartily disagree.)
Now, email is everywhere and discussion boards abound. What is the next frontier for physician community communication? Is it Weblogs? I'm trying to figure that out. I've already seen some great, really great, examples of what a motivated, opinionated doc can do with a blog (see the examples in my blog roll to the right). But I'm not yet sure if this is a medium for the "everydoc" or just an easy way for some special personalities to easily get their message out.
At Medscape, where I now work, they spent a lot more time on creating the very best content for physicians on the Internet and building a business around online Continuing Medical Education. Is there an opportunity to become the leader in using blogs for physician to physician communication? If we provide the pulpit for sites like Medrants to reach the large audience ofdocs on Medscape, will that kick start the form? And what's the business model (It is 2002, after all). I'll try to work through the answers, publicly, here, so stay tuned. I welcome your comments.
8:47:15 PM 
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