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Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks
Jessica Vascellario has written an interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal: Social Networking Goes Professional. It describes a professional social network for doctors called Sermo.com, where doctors share information on treatments, diagnoses, and other medical topics.
The Sermo demo video (worth watching) asks “Why consult one colleague when you could consult thousands?”. Of course, to ask this is to assume that all of those thousands of colleagues actually know what they’re doing: they’re not fraudulent doctors who make stuff up. The way Sermo solves this is by verifying every doctor who signs up against a database of licensed physicians…so it is open to anybody, as long as you’re a real doctor. This will help to keep the system at some basic level of professionalism.
On a MediaConnect Hunter vs Hunted Valley Vibe
Invitation to join the OpenGardens network - more ..
Hello all ..
I have been pleasantly surprised as to how well this has been received.
Please keep your emails coming if you are interested in being a part of the OpenGardens network.
I hope to launch this around Sep 10 - because I am speaking at a number of conferences after
that and we would get good exposure
There were some requests for clarification .. and so here is the announcement in a bit more detail
The OpenGardens network is the evolution of the OpenGardens blog. The OpenGardens blog is already well known ? with a Google page rank of 6/10 and an Alexa rating of
around 100,000
The problem we are trying to address is: How to get maximum exposure for great bloggers ? this is especially so when blogs may not be frequently updated all the time.
The benefits to contributors are: More exposure for your blog and ideas. There is no
cost and no advertising on your blog. The only requirement is: you must be insightful within the topic areas below. The frequency of blogs does not matter. We have interest from people who work for companies and run a private blog(typically a blog which may be insightful - but infrequent) - and that?s very welcome
The basic idea is to do a concept similar to techmeme i.e. a human edited (i.e. initially me!) set of
blogs in specific themes. These blogs will be sourced from a set of
contributors . The OpenGardens network blog will not contain the whole post ? but a summary linking back to your site
Each OpenGardens network blog will also have an FAQ i.e. a non chronological summary of the ideas presented in an FAQ format (which will be also link back to your blog)
So,
a) Evolving from the OpenGardens blog, the OpenGardens network would have a set of blogs ? each covering a theme
b) We would have set of preferred contributors (blogs). Please email me if you think you are a good contributor for this
c) Articles from these (and other recommended blogs) would feature on the OpenGardens network blogs
d) They would be linked back to the source thus providing coverage
e) Each OpenGardens network blog would have an accompanying FAQ (although maybe
not at the outset). It benefits people who are not regular bloggers because their ideas are linked to the FAQ besides being in the blog itself.
f) I expect to launch in mid Sep since I am speaking at four major conferences from that time and it will get good coverage
g) The network will be ad sponsored ? with ads on my blogs only (not the contributor’s blogs)
h) We will start with: Web 2.0, Mobile Web 2.0, Social networking, User generated content and Enterprise web 2.0 purely because I know these areas on my own - at least enough to edit
There will be a logo/image to go on your blog. Other than that, nothing else. It should get you good traffic both on the OpenGardens network itself and also the FAQ.
i) I believe it will work great for corporate bloggers as well
If you think you are a good contributor for this, please email me on ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com
Kind rgds
Ajit