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Blog Notes #1 on Your Use of IBN&R -- First 2 Weeks |
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Written by John Weeks
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IBN&R Blog Notes #1 -- Initial Use Patterns
The Integrator Blog News and Reports (IBN&R) site is first of all an
efficient delivery mechanism for a newsletter and reports. The basic resources
available on the front page, left side, are part of that information service.
Comfort with the value of the site's more blog-ish, interactive
potential appears to
be as strange to many of you as it was to me in January when my first
exploration of this medium began. Blogging was a phenomenon by and
for people from some other tribe. I had rarely participated, except a few news sites.  The Blob, not the Blog
The First Poll -- The Multi-Disciplinary Nature of Your Lives
Clearly, many of you share this resistance. An example: I thought it interesting to know how multi-disciplinary are your professional lives.
Thus the first poll: "I am involved with more than one discipline, at
least one of them CAM ..." I would like to state conclusively that:
- 61% of you work with more than one discipline daily
- 19% every couple of days
- 12% every now and then ... and etc.
However, few of you chose to participate. When the "N" participating in the poll
is roughly 25 out of 1000 possible
readers, well, one hesitates to draw any conclusions! I hope to see
participation go up. Got any fetching poll ideas?
Learning from "Page Views" -- Would You Rather be on Sabbatical?
There is a sort of voyeurism in looking at the "page views" to see which of the articles or resources were opened the most by you. Here is the picture after two weeks.
One might conclude that most of you
would rather be someplace else! In the first phase, the Sabbatical page won out. Of the articles, the most traffic for most of the week was the
Bravewell/The New Medicine article.
Then - one of the mystery pleasures of this form of communication -
in two days in early April, suddenly the article on the Five Branches
Institute's program to educate MDs in acupuncture took a big jump and has continued to rise since, to 317 page views. I imagine somebody sent a note about it to a list. Bravewell is at 268 and the Sabbatical at 268. The next most opened articles were on the chiropractic reform
effort (206), the Folkman interview on the conventional academic
consortium (205), the Global Medicine program (188) and Clem Bezold's work with CAM and disparities
reduction (175). Many of you were interested in the vision-mission
statement (142). The top "core resource" opened was the paper on
integrative clinics (71).
Use of the Forums: You Can Be Anonymous, Join, or Allow Others to Contact You
You have many choices in approaching the IBN&R Forums -- the opportunity to begin real exchanges on content and ideas. You can:
- observe, read and not respond or participate
- participate anonymously, merely commenting and seeing what may follow
- become a member, but give no details about yourself
- provide information so that those who see a post can contact you (see the Member list), or
- you can open a forum in an area of your choice.
Just today the first reader, "Sophie," a Canadian researcher looking at integrative clinic models to inter-professional relationships, asked for some help from you in shaping her research plan regarding an integrative clinic. Take a look!
I hope that this zone will grow in its use to you. At least 87 of you have
ventured in. (Thanks for your comments! -- on both content and
layout/design.) Thus far some of the best comments I have seen on
content have come directly to me and not through the forum mechanism. I
synopcized some of these - without revealing the authors except by
discipline or institutiion type - in the Bravewell/New Medicine forum. I hope more of you will directly share your ideas. This was the most visited forum. I will from time to time post a particularly good comment separately, as an article. The comment of Bill Manahan, MD, on his version of a new medicine merited selection and has been separately posted.
Develop Your Own Forum Topics
Please
know that you can also develop new themed discussion areas of interest
to you -- as "Sophie" has on her research question. For instance, I spoke recently with an
acupuncturist-naturopathic physician colleague who is interested in
enhancing delivery of services to groups. Who is doing it? What is
working? Where are the outcomes? Who might be a good interview? This is
an example of a way someone with a passion could introduce, manage, and
stimulate a forum. Let me know if you have interest. Or go ahead and
start one up!
Thanks for participating!
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