Why Blogging

Blogs are the foundation of medical education in social media

• Longer
• More thoughtful
• Permanent/Indexed

The relationship between blogging and Twitter is like the relationship between thought and conversation. Thinking drives conversations which then drives more thought.

This is the model we use in NephJC. We start with a blog post about the journal article. Then we have a chat (actually two) about the journal article and then after the chat we resynthesize the discussion into another blog post by creating the Storify and Summary for PubMed Commons

Blogging Platforms

There are a lot of blogging platforms, this not an exhaustive list. Some highlights:

• Blogger. Free. Simple to use. It is an older platform and though it is capable, I would not recommend choosing this for a new blog. 
  • Renal Fellow Network
  • PBFluids
  • NephronPower
• WordPress. Free and paid options. A bit harder to use but still appropriate for a beginner. It is a very deep platform that is used by many professional blogs: The New York Times, Forbes, BuzzFeed, Time, Jay-Z and BestBuy use WordPress for their blogs.
  • AJKDblog
  • PaulSufka.com, a rheumatologist. He has posted two guides to medical blogging that are worth exploring for more information
    • How to Blog
    • My 2015 WordPress Setup 
• SquareSpace. Paid options only. Easy to use. Its ease of use hides a lot of power. One design can be used across phones, tablets and computers without any additional work by the author. 
  • NephJC
• Medium. Designed for episodic posts rather than a serial diary. They do the graphic design for you and the results are great. Designed with rich social integration.
• Facebook Notes. Looks like Zuckerburg cloned Medium inside of Facebook. 

We are going to use Medium.

Very similar to Facebook notes.

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