One of my past career attempts was in web design. Back in the year 2001 I collaborated with some guys who were working on a start-up. Their business model? A web community. One of the guys had participated in the creation of neopets.com and he had made some substantial funds from selling this site after it became popular. His new plan was to duplicate that success by creating another community that he could populate, and then sell.
The group disbanded after a year of trying. It’s no wonder they didn’t succeed. Instead of focusing on communities that they had some sort of interest in, they only focused on what they perceived could be profitable. When your endgame is pure profit and you don’t really have a passion for the ideas behind it, success is uncertain. Not to mention that it was 2001, the year the tech bubble burst.
Since then I have always been interested in the concept of “web communities.” And since I began my nursing career I have always asked the question, “Is there a web community out there for us?”
Exploring this issue, I started out with random “nurse” searches on google. That is when I discovered nursing blogs. I also searched for a centralized web based community for nurses. Not much came up. There were some attempts, but mostly they were just static websites, lacking in up to date content and interactive qualities. (Example: Cybernurse.com) Essentially they were website ghost towns.
I did come across one web community that had some value, allnurses.com. This site’s value is in its forums. Because of the sheer number of readers, you can almost always expect to get feedback when you post on their messageboards. I hesitate to mention this site because they have a strict policy of not allowing anyone to post an outward link (i.e. a link to your blog). This effectively prevents us, the nursing blog community, from sharing our blogs with their users. While I understand why they have this policy, (I assume it’s a way of ensuring that no one actually leaves the site, and therefore brings more revenue from advertising). What they do not understand, however, is that they are turning away a valuable source of content.
And now there’s a new contender: nurselinkup.com. This site is currently in beta mode so its value will be seen as more nurses continue to populate it. The good news is that they appear to welcome bloggers, as evidenced by allowing you to link to your blog when you set up your profile. I’ve also noticed that another fellow blogger, Keith, from Digital Doorway has been contracted to provide content. It will be interesting to watch this site develop.
But after pondering all of this I realized that the nursing web community I’ve been looking for IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.
It’s US, the nursing blog community. We pretty much have all the aspects of a community and what we don’t have, we have the potential to create. And we can also take pride in the fact the we’ve created it ourselves, and we are the ones that keep it going. So give yourselves a pat on the back, nurse bloggers! I predict that very soon many more nurses are going to be embracing this medium, from academics, to hospital administrators, as well as individual nurses.
Next: What are our strengths and where are we headed?