Happy birthday to hospital impact!

Well, it's been one month since I started hospital impact. and what a ride it's been! Now that I have 30 days of blogging under my belt, I can safely say that:

Blogs on hospital administration/leadership are few and far between.

There are some good medical blogs by doctors, some good health IT blogs by IT professionals, and good policy & news blogs by consultants. But by and large, there's nothing solely for hospital leaders. Is this a fluke? Am I on to something new and novel? Or maybe no one's done it before because there's just not enough hospital leaders who even know what a blog is?

Search engines are weird

Can anyone make sense of the difference between yahoo and google and ask? Notice that if you search for healthcare blogs on yahoo, hospital impact will be your #2 hit. but if you search for healthcare blog (no "s"), hospital impact will be your #244 hit. Also, Jack Welch 8 Leadership Principle is your #1 hit on yahoo, but no where to be found on google? The only thing I have figured out is that yahoo uses the key words associated with the blog, where as google doesn't.

I enjoy learning new things.

As nerdy as it sounds, blogging seems to be yet another manifestation of this inherent curiousity and desire to learn. The physical process of writing and editing clarifies the idea in my mind, helping me to learn.

Other ways this has manifested itself? Last year, my sister and I were walking down the street and passed a crafts store. We went in with no agenda, but came out with yarn, two sticks, and a "how to" book. 3 hours later, we had knit an ugly scarf. Also, I recently decided to learn how to play the accordian. Just finished learning "The Godfather."

I'm a sucker for stats.

I don't know if this is a guy thing (i.e. the popularity of fantasy sports), a geek thing, or a performance-driven thing, but I watch my web statistics way too much. I need to publicly confess that I have looked at my blog stats page and hit "refresh" to see the hits number go up one by one.

by the way, the stats:
# of visits: 2,000+
# of unique visitors: 380
# of hits: ~37,000 hits (although probably ~30,000 of those are me checking stats)

# of times I've wanted to discontinue hospital impact: 3
# of times I've mistakenly visited a "bad" site while researching for hospital impact: 3
Average # of times I edit a post after it's been published: 4-5
# of times I've blogged when I should've been doing something else: ~20
# of sites that link to hospital impact: 4
# of people who have added hospital impact to their favorites (est.): 30
# of minutes it takes me to post an entry: ~40
# of spam hits from a paxil-selling website: 60
# of days I didn't post anything: 1

Starting this weekend, I will be taking weekends off to keep fresh. Go Bulls!

# of minutes I should have spent on this post: 30
# of minutes I actually spent on this post: 90

It's been really interesting seeing how ya'll end up on this site. Today, someone landed on my site through a yahoo search on "healthcare blogs."

Search engines are great and invaluable, but the fact that they work on such different algorithms confuses me.

when you do a search on healthcare blogs, hospitalimpact.org is...
- #2 & #3 on yahoo search
- not even in the top 250 on google or MSN Search

But if you do a search on "healthcare blogs" (with the quotations),
- #3 & #4 on yahoo search
- #17 on google
- not found in MSN Search

while we're on the topic of somewhat useless stats, wordcount (from the maker of tenbyten.org) says that "hospital" is the 651st most used word in the English language.

hospital just beat out friends, shown, and music, and was barely beat out by poor, award, and front. The #1 word? Clue: the word is in this sentence.

well, it's been two weeks since I started hospitalimpact.org. As I've been struggling with html code, sifting through hospital news, researching blogging trends, and thinking about hospital leadership, here are some observations.

Blogging for hospital leaders: an oxymoron?

Blogging may have been the "word of the year" in 2004 (ironically, "blog" narrowly beat out "incumbent"), but still very few people are familiar with blogs. Research has shown that only 7% of the population is "very familiar" with blogs. I'm pretty sure that % is even less for hospital leaders, which begs the question: why is hospitalimpact.org a blog in the first place? is a blog for hospital leaders an oxymoron? A valid question.

Blogging is fun for me... so far...
I realized something about myself this week: when I learn, I write, and when I write, I learn. so, because I love learning (apparently one of my strengths in strengthsfinder), I love to blog.

But as one visitor mentioned, blogging is like "having homework for the rest of your life." So far, thankfully, it hasn't been like that. It's been exciting to see how people end up on this site - one site out of 8 billion+ websites (websites outnumber people 4 to 3!?). And I've felt the child-like joy of learning something new.

Bloggers don't make money blogging

Even mildly popular bloggers that get thousands of hits per day probably can't blog for a living. It's simply not enough traffic to make it worth the while for advertisers or sponsors. Back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me advertisers pay ~0.5 to 1 cent per visit. Most bloggers blog on the side or as a marketing tool for their consulting firm or their day job. Of course, blogging doesn't cost that much either. $10-20 for a domain name plus $5-10 dollars/month for hosting, depending on your traffic. It's the time commitment that's killer.

Quality vs. Quantity
Yes, I admit it, I've been weak. Pumping out quantity instead of quality. Isn't one truly original thought/idea a week more valuable than 1 semi-new idea a day? Shouldn't I shoot for one shining idea vs. several dim ones? Stay tuned.

Anyway, thanks for visiting! hospitalimpact.org has already had 500+ visits simply from word-of-mouth (though I'm still trying to figure out how many of those hits was me). any riveting comments, random ideas, half-baked thoughts, crazy questions, effusive praise, ill-willed bashing, inspiration to share, offers of sponsorship or free pizza, feel free at tony[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org