You have a health related blog or are considering starting one. What on earth is a "Blog Network" and why should you care?

The question I would ask you is what kind of audience do you want to reach, why and how. How do you go about it now?

Of course there are search engines. Google, Technorati and others do bring visitors in. But a large part of that traffic is to put it mildly irrelevant. Your blog can get easily lost in a sea of rubbish. Blogosphere is a wonderful place but sometimes hard to get around.

HealthVoices release of New Year 2006 is a milestone towards helping medical bloggers organize around their audience.

Now anyone can start a free blog at HealthVoices. It does not matter whether your "main" blog is hosted with us or elsewhere. The idea is that by regularly blogging at a hub, exclusively focused on health and medicine, you reach the audience that really cares about what you say. This can mean one or more things, mainly:

• Pool the reach and audience of multiple bloggers
• Organize posts into categories, navigable across blogs
• Link to your existing blog(s) from your HealthVoices posts
• Rely on us to promote and search-optimize the entire hub
• Traffic, Audience, Influence, Fame, Fortune (TAIFF)

OK, you might say but how does it work? If anyone can create a blog it is no different from Blogger, TypePad or WordPress.

YES and NO. While anyone can create a blog at HealthVoices and post anything (almost), for the benefit of the audience we promote regular bloggers around their topics of interest and expertise. This brings a bit more structure than a personal blog, but is way more open then how the mainstream media is organized.

We already announced how our feature columns work and are proud to highlight our first few columnists again:

• David Donohue, MD: Healthy Living
• Robert Lamberts, MD: Healthy Living, Physician EMR Review
• Gary Levin, MD: RHIO Monitor

So, sign up for an account and start a blog. If you too want to be a featured columnist drop us a note on what your interests are.

UPDATE: Reasons to use a blog in medical practice: "Physician Blogging: How to Get Results Worthy of Time & Effort"