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