The power of blogging and Web 2.0

UPDATE: One commenter noted a potential misunderstanding regarding gender. All female references ("her" and "she") in the story are intended to refer to Carol Kirschner, not the blogger to which she responded nor to the creator of ShandsSucks.com.  I've attempted a rewording that makes this more clear. I was right about the sentence being complicated... :-)

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I just noticed that Carol Kirschner has a post in the Driving in Traffic blog entitled Healthcare providers, do you wonder if blogs matter?. It's an object lesson in the power of blogging and in particular, the power of one of the keystone social networking features of Web 2.0, the trackback ping. Trackbacks are one of the most powerful ways to link into existing conversations in the Blogosphere, because it leverages the ranking algorithm used by Google and other search engines, raising the visibility of the conversation and its subject matter in the collective mind of the Web as a whole, beyond the scope of the Blogosphere.

Take a deep breath before starting the next paragraph. :-)

Her (Carol's) post is in response to another blogger's post about a news story that quoted the blogger, a story written about a website put up by a very dissatisfied client of a healthcare operation.

The news story was published in the print edition of the paper and is also online. The healthcare operation has as of this moment not responded publicly to the best of my knowledge, but even without their input there are already four interlinked nodes on the Web that refer to the story, two within the Blogosphere and two without. When my post is noticed by the Google spider, it will have tracked back to her (Carol's) post and the post to which she was responding, creating another node (my post) and additional links to all of the following: Carol's Driving In Traffic post, the post to which Carol responded, and the news story. This will multiply the network effect Carol describes:

Google now has a couple of more links to consider. For those of you who do not know, many search engines give higher credit to blog links when they consider position rankings within their systems. And now that I have used a trackback to Josh [the - the impact of my single post has potentially been doubled.

Kudos to Carol for her illustration of the power of social networking tools in general and blogging in particular.

PS: I know nothing about Shands and am making no value judgement regarding the institution in writing this post, which is about the power of blogging and the network effect. I will say that the stories on ShandsSucks.com are both saddening and infuriating, and if they are true, Shands is not a place I would go for healthcare, to say the least. I add the caveat because there are multiple sides to any story, so it's not my place to judge.

Comments

[Gadfly]

Thank you for covering this, and thank you for pointing out the simplest solution is to acknowledge and address the problem early on.

In my experience, however, is that higher profile bloggers and mainstream media are highly unlikely to offer such support. Criticism is "partisan", while bloggers as well as reporters want to remain "neutral" to enhance their own credibility. And their own disinclination to help out actually assists in the suppression. I belong to a pretty substantial network of critics, but there's not what we can do about an organization that has the resources to pay people like you so they can own Google.

As we speak, a bunch of bloggers who have carefully honed their credibility by refusing to help critics are meeting in Washington to offer organizations further advice on what to "do about" people like me. How do I know this is a suck up conference? I don't see any strong critic bloggers on the panels.

If anyone would like to help the underdog, here's my link: http://corphq.livejournal.com

[jon]

Umm you got it a little mixed up; last time i checked i was male; i am the creator of ShandsSucks.com

[Dr. Mary Johnson]

On the flip side of unhappey patients, how about unhappy healthcare providers? Try this one (www.awhitewall.com) on for size.