The Health and Medical Blog Community Embraces eDrugSearch.com's Healthcare 100.

New Global Ranking System Makes It Easier to Find Influential Healthcare Bloggers

SAN ANTONIO -- The Healthcare 100, a global ranking of the most influential English-language health and medical blogs, has quickly emerged as a go-to resource for healthcare bloggers, blog readers and the

The Healthcare 100 was unveiled on June 14 by eDrugSearch.com, a free search engine and online community for Americans interested in purchasing safe, low-cost prescription drugs from prescreened international pharmacies. Since the Healthcare 100's launch, more than 60 different health and medical blogs have published posts weighing in on the ranking system, according to Technorati. The response has been largely enthusiastic.

"The mission of eDrugSearch.com is to provide information that will help consumers make smart healthcare decisions," said Cary Byrd, president of eDrugSearch.com. "The Healthcare 100 is an extension of that philosophy."

Byrd, who started the eDrugSearch Blog last November, said he was inspired to create the Healthcare 100 to provide a unifying resource for health and medical blogs.

"As a group, healthcare blogs have far less blog 'juice' than technology blogs or political blogs or gossip blogs. This is aggravated by the fact that healthcare blogs have subdivided into some pretty tight niches, so -- for example -- if you're a pharma blogger like me, you could blog for months and never discover some of the great non-pharma medical blogs," Byrd said.

"My hope is that the Healthcare 100 will serve to increase the influence of all health and medical blogs by making it easier for bloggers, blog readers and the media to find us -- and to see what a thriving corner of the blogosphere we are when viewed as a single, if diverse, community."

Patterned after Todd Andrlik's popular Power 150 ranking of marketing blogs, the Healthcare 100 uses Google PageRank, Bloglines subscriber totals and Technorati authority rankings to measure the overall influence of each blog. To add spice to the rankings, Byrd adds his own "eDrugSearch Points" based on each blog's quality of writing, frequency of posts, usefulness of content, and relevance of information to the topic of healthcare.

Byrd said that nearly 100 health and medical bloggers have asked for their blogs to be added to the list since its launch. The Healthcare 100 now actively tracks more than 300 blogs; all blogs that fall outside the top 100 are included in the rankings as "honorable mentions."