Staying Healthy on a Diet of Blogs

Blogs? Bleh.

The Web has information on just about anything and everything, including nutrition and food science. As educators and students, no doubt you have your own strategies for keeping up on the latest trends and research findings in food science.

Let's explore how people -- nutrition experts and non-experts both -- are using weblogs to share, propagate and debunk nutrition information.

What's a Weblog?

Weblogs are a type of web page. Also known as blogs, they are frequently updated pages with the postings arranged reverse chronologically (newest at top). Blogs use lots of links to outside sites, pages and search engines. Usually written by one person, blogs often include a way for readers to leave their own comments.

Read the blogging101 presentation for an overview of how weblogs developed. Here's what you'll learn there:

The first weblogs were What's New pages in the early days of the Internet, pointing to any new content available online.
The next weblogs filtered the growing World Wide Web, recommending the most interesting and useful content available online.
The next weblogs were online diaries or journals of individual writers, about the events, highlights and readings from their lives.
Weblogs today are a mix of new content, recommended links and personal or organizational information. They can be specialized (e.g. politics, sleep disorders, babies or tsunami relief efforts), or about anything and everything a person encounters in his/her life.
Weblogs have played crucial roles in the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina: “If you were lucky enough to have Internet access, you were more likely to find useful information—about, for example, which parts of the city were dry, or where drinking water was available—on blogs than on any government site.” (New Yorker, 9/12/05). Those are getting the attention, but far more are helping to build communities and better inform citizens.
Weblogs can be an excellent way to monitor new information about a subject (I read macminute.com for Apple computer news and U2log.com for news about my favorite rock band). Similarly, they can be a useful tool to share your expertise or program information.

You can create a weblog in under 5 minutes using the free service from Blogsome. A similar service by Typepad offers a 30-day free trial. There are dozens of free, open-source blogging software tools available (start at opensourcecms.com).

Let's look at one of my blog posts: Not again, about food-related illness. Which of the three stages of blog development does this post reflect? Notice the links I provide; how would you assess the credibility of the sources? How did I find those sources? Here's another post: Twinkie time.

Internet Research Tools

Bloggers often react to news or current events, and build their posts on information they get through search engines:

Google
One of the most popular online search engines. Not only can you search the Web with Google, but specialized tools from Google allow you to search for images, maps and scientific literature. (Google also offers an excellent -- and free -- e-mail service called Gmail.) You may want to use the News Alerts feature of Google News to receive daily updates on the topic of your choice - a good way to keep up on news related to your work. (Yahoo News is another popular source of blog info.)

Scirus
Scirus is another scientific literature search engine. It gives results for web pages and journal articles (not newspaper articles). Most of the article results include abstracts of the article, and many also provide links to the full text of the article.

Wikipedia
A wiki is a type of web software that allows anyone to change the content on the page. The Wikipedia is a comprehensive and ever-growing encyclopedia written by thousands of people around the world. Bloggers go here to find definitions, explanations and links to other resources. (You may be an expert on something and even want to contribute to the effort.)

NCBI Entrez
The Entrez site from the National Center for Biotechnology Information provides one way to search dozens of specialized databases. This is a good place to find medical literature and detailed information about the genomes of many plants and animals.

Indeed
There are hundreds of job boards and career sites on the Internet. Indeed is a metasearch engine - use it to search many job sites at once. You may not want a new job, but knowing about job opportunities in your area can help you connect your colleagues and students to those opportunities.

A survey of nutrition blogs

Experts can blog:

Bora Zivkovic blogs about circadian rhythms at Circadiana.
A group of scholars collect posts that use facts and/or science to examine and/or debunk myths or phenomena that are widely believed but have little or no basis in fact at Circular Reasoning.
A group of physicians blog about all kinds of medicine and health topics at Grand Rounds.
Richard Kahn blogs at Vegan Blog. Is he an expert?

And, of course, non-experts blog:

nutritioninfopage claims to be “an excellent online resource section for nutrtion information.” But is it? How do you assess the credibility of a blogger? Look for an About page.
The Grumpy Old Bookman delves into the credentials of a TV food show.
Chez Pim chronicles one woman's musings on food, among other things.

Businesses and government agencies blog, too:

Stonyfield Farm has a collection of blogs aimed at their customers.
The Alabama Cooperative Extension Service sometimes blogs about nutrition.

How do you find other blogs?

Try Technorati, a search engine of nearly 17 million blogs.

A blog of your own

Why should you consider using a weblog in your work as a nutrition educator? Consider these scenarios:

Food Science What's New weblog - Use a weblog to chronicle news about nutrition policy progress and food science research.

Nutrition filter blog - Use a weblog to provide a frequently updated and annotated list of links to new journal articles, online nutrition resources and consumer tools.

Class or professor journal blog - Use a weblog to share class discussions, your scholarship, or your personal road to a healthy lifestyle, with links to resources and news whenever available and appropriate.

The combo blog – Use a weblog with a combination of What’s New information, filtered resources and journal entries.

More ways to get the same

Podcasts
Podcasts are audio files that are offered through a weblog. Free software such as iPodder can download the audio podcasts to your computer and automatically transfer them to your iPod or other digital music device, so you can listen to the audio content whenever and wherever you want.

Newsfeeds
Most weblogs and many news organizations automatically publish a newsfeed (known as RSS, RDF, Atom or XML, and often shown with an orange button). A newsfeed is the same content as the weblog but it can be read in many email clients or newsreader programs, such as Feedreader, FeedDemon and NewsMonster, as well as Bloglines. Use a newsreader to efficiently track multiple blogs and news sites.

The orange RSS button beside each of the weblog names is the newsfeed. Right-click and save the link to subscribe to the newsfeed in your newsreader.

Blogs in Greensboro

Greensboro is known across the country for being a pioneer in citizen journalism and buidling community through blogs. Consider attending the ConvergeSouth conference in early October. You can monitor the Greensboro blogging communnity by reading Ed Cone's weblog.