Thing One: Setting up a Blog

As I set up my blog, thing one in the ’23 things on a stick’ program, for the second time (I didn’t get very far in the first go-round of this event at the beginning of 2008), I’m excited to look at the social web tools I’ll be familiarizing myself with from a professional perspective. My profession, which I’ve listed as a Public Health Information Specialist is slightly misleading. I’m currently a public health professional working on a post-doctoral fellowship to obtain education and training in library and information science with the hopes of combining the two fields once this training fellowship is complete. It’s now been over five months since my fellowship began and already I see many opportunities for being cross-trained in the two fields. First, working in a library setting and immersing myself in this field, I see many ways that library and information professionals are connecting via the social web. Health promotion professionals could benefit from these new technologies as well.

Blogs could be a very useful way for public health professionals to develop and strengthen their professional communities and an excellent way to share experiences with health promotion interventions. From my experience, local public health professionals are thirsty to know what their colleagues in other local public health or community-based organizations are doing and how it is working in their communities. Unfortunately, as some areas of public health funding decline, there are few opportunities to share experiences face-to-face. I believe that this is especially true of staff level positions in local public health and community-based organizations. Additionally, I think blogs could be useful ways for public health to communicate with community members.

While I believe that blogs can and will be useful to public health professionals, I do have concerns about how to get the ball rolling for this group. My question is ‘How do we develop and maintain these on-line communities?’ It seems that regular and meaningful content are especially important as well as individuals dedicated to contributing that content, however, how to get these individuals engaged in the process is currently unclear to me.