Introducing the Healthcare 100

By now many of you have already noticed the Healthcare 100, eDrugSearch.com’s little contribution to the health and medical blogosphere. Here’s some of the thought behind this project:

1. The blogosphere is crazy big and getting bigger every day, with Technorati tracking tens of millions of blogs of various levels of quality, posting frequency, entertainment value, etc.

2. If you’re interested in blogs about a particular subject — in my case, health and medical blogs — Technorati is not an ideal resource for finding them. The reason is that Technorati’s blog tagging system lets users determine in which categories (up to 20) their blog belongs. As a result, if you run a blog search for any healthcare-related term, you’ll have to sort through many, many blogs that have relatively little to do with healthcare.

3. I’ve also found the healthcare blog world to be very fragmented. As a group, we have far less blog “juice” than, say, tech blogs or political blogs or gossip blogs or marketing blogs. This is aggravated by the fact that healthcare blogs have subdivided into some pretty tight niches, so — for example — if you’re a pharma blogger like me, you could blog for several months (as I have) and never discover some of the great non-pharma medical blogs.

My hope is that the Healthcare 100 will serve to increase the influence of ALL health and medical blogs by making it easier for bloggers, blog readers and the media to find us — and to see what a thriving corner of the blogosphere we are when viewed as a single, if diverse, community.

As I explain here, the Healthcare 100 ranking system is based on an algorithm created by marketing blogger Todd And. Todd has been extremely gracious in helping us set up the Healthcare 100, and we are grateful to him. The Healthcare 100 is automated, so Technorati rankings, Google PageRank and Bloglines subscribers are pulled by the system on an ongoing basis. That means I should have at least a little time left to do my real job.

Oh — and here’s what I need YOU to do.

1. If your blog’s not included, I’m sorry — believe me, it wasn’t an intentional oversight, I just haven’t found you yet. So please add your blog now! It’ll take you 30 seconds.

2. If you’re going to complain about the Healthcare 100, that’s fine — I welcome it, because I want to make it better. But please be specific, rather than taking a general swipe, so I’ll know what I need to fix. I welcome your suggestions at carybyrd@edrugsearch.com.

3. One issue I’m currently working to fix is that I’m afraid, in at least a few cases, I may not have used a blog’s primary RSS feed for Bloglines purposes. If your Bloglines subscriber ranking looks off, please e-mail me and I’ll be happy to work with you to make sure your ranking is correct.

That goes for ANYTHING about your ranking that looks off to you, by the way. I’m happy to discuss it with you. More than anything, I want the Healthcare 100 to be as accurate as possible.