Dear blog
BMJ 2007; 334 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.0706244 (Published 01 June 2007) Cite this as: BMJ 2007;334:0706244
- Jemima T Tagal, medical student1
- 1Cardiff University
It's 1 am, and you're in the doctor's mess because your surgical team has asked you to be on-call with them. It's been a quiet night and they're dozing, but you've got exams next week, and you need to cram. You feel like throwing the books away and giving up medicine altogether. You've had a bad day, and it doesn't help that you're in a rural, 100 bed hospital with none of your friends around for a rant.
Perhaps a bit of verbal diarrhoea will help vent the frustration. But who will listen in the middle of the night? If you're the sort of person who keeps a diary, you probably know how therapeutic it is to put feelings into words on paper. Alternatively, type it into your laptop and publish it on your blog.
What's a blog?
The word “blog” is a short form of “weblog,” a word created in 1997. Typically, blogs are personal websites that include regular entries from a person, combining text, images, and links to other blogs and websites. The articles or “entries” are usually in chronological order of a single author's pet subjects, which are compiled into archives. Alternatively, a blog may be managed by many different contributors on a common set of topics. Usually readers may leave a comment, which the author or other readers can respond to-this then becomes a web forum of sorts, with many different opinions.
In the past few years, about five million blogs have burst on to the internet. This trend seems set to escalate. The blog search engine and measurement firm Technorati estimates that 23000 new blogs are being created every day.1 …
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