#1 Social News Site for Health Professionals

Amid the various news-sharing and social networks, it’s easy to become confused about where to go to look for good information. Digg.com is a popular site, as is StumbleUpon.com. People submit favorite links so that others may see them and check them out. The more people who “digg" you or “stumble” you, the higher the chances of more people seeing your post or site. Getting on the front page of Digg is considered a major coup in the blogging world. I’m still working on that one.

A while ago, Healthranker.com joined in the mix, bringing to you health-related articles. It bills itself as “the #1 social media health news site dedicated to bringing you the latest health news and health-related information.” It’s a decent place, but it’s geared towards the general public. Some of the stories are good, but I’ve seen some that made me wonder why they’re there.

I just discovered a new social media health news site, but this one is geared towards nurses and other healthcare professionals. It’s called HealthcareToday.com. They say, “Nobody knows what's really happening in healthcare today better than the professionals in healthcare, and Healthcare Today is their real-time, up-to-the-minute view of the most important things on the web right now.”

A quick look at their site shows you that you can browse by category (nursing, administration, pharma, technology, and so on) or you can check on What’s Hot. A few days ago, I submitted my blog post on the passing of Donna Wong. My submission gave it one vote, other submissions brought it up to four. So, it’s still in the top news.

If you have your own blog or site, you can put buttons on your posts for people to vote for you. I did this for Help My Hurt and Womb Within. Unfortunately, because the audience for those two blogs is more the general public, they don’t seem to be interested in voting. Oh well — it was worth a try.

You don’t need to have your own blog or site to use the service. As you browse through the Internet and you find an interesting bit of information, you can go to the HealthcareToday.com site and enter it. The first time a blog or site is entered, you need to enter the URL (address), the title, and a very brief description of what your submission is about. For example, for the Wong piece, my description was “Donna Lee Wong, died earlier this year. She was one half of the team that invented the Wong-Baker pain scale for children. She also wrote some textbooks that most of us have seen throughout the years if we work in peds or maternity.”

So, if you’re looking for interesting information or new sites or blogs to check out, you may want to see what Health Today has to offer.