Bloggers Share Health News With Sick Blogs

Posted on June 27, 2006

SFGate.com reports on a specific type of blog they are calling sick blogs. These blogs help people communicate with others that are suffering from a similar ailment or illness. They also make it easier for the sick blogger to keep family and friends updated on their status and progress.

The article also mentions a pair of websites, carepages.com and caringbridge.org, which contain about 100,000 patient pages that also "publicly chronicle ailments" like sick blogs do. For sick bloggers, there may be something comforting and therapeutic about linking to other bloggers who are suffering from the same thing. It also sounds like a much easier way to keep people informed about your health status than mail, phones or even email.

In the past people have used bulk emails or newsletters but spam filter problems sometimes prevent these from being delivered and having a blog is much easier to maintain then having to constantly change people's email addresses when you manage a newsletter. Derek Gordon, marketing director of Technorati, could not give the SFGate an exact figure on the number of sick blogs but did say the sites often use keywords like illness and survivor.