This week sees the launch of the BMJ’s first Christmas appeal. The money we hope to raise will go to Medécins Sans Frontières. They provide an invaluable service in some of the toughest parts of the world, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe. MSF staff and volunteers deal daily with extraordinary personal risks and practical clinical challenges. We recently reported on David Notts, who operated on a boy in the Democratic Republic of Congo using instructions sent by text message. If you would like to donate to the BMJ’s Christmas appeal then please visit http://www.msf.org.uk/bmjappeal more…

This new weekly blog tells you about what’s new on bmj.com and links to some of the national and international coverage that the BMJ has received this week, both on websites and in blogs.

The BMJ paper that has received the widest coverage this week shows that happiness is contagious and can spread from person to person. It is the most read article on our website this week, with 12,327 viewers. The paper by James H Fowler and Nicholas A Christakis followed 4739 participants from 1983-2003. By studying social networks, the researchers found that happy people are more likely to be connected to other happy people. They also found that people at the centre of their social network were more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of it. more…

As I write this my boss is discussing video on bmj.com with other senior colleagues, mainly to see if we should commit to providing more embedded video clips alongside news, comment, feature, and research articles. You might think this is a no-brainer. Other sites have been doing this successfully for years. And although it needn’t necessarily cost the earth, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. So I’d like your views on the three we’ve done to date. more…

Continuous publication marks a significant shift in BMJ’s publishing cycle. From now on we will be populating bmj.com with lots of new content on a daily basis, instead of using the weekly print issue as the catalyst for a mass upload of articles. The homepage will change more frequently (as well as the pages showing latest news, research comment and education), and there will be a rolling table of contents that will show every article published in the past seven days. more…

“If history has taught us anything, it’s that Internet business models are like buses: If you miss one, all you have to do is wait a little while another one will come along.” Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think

On the basis of recent mega-deals (Rupert Murdoch’s $580m for MySpace, Google’s $1.65bn for YouTube) it seems reasonable to conclude that the targetted marketing of products to end users is the favoured internet business model of the moment. In these transactions, advertisers pay; end users don’t. more…

Let’s start at the very beginning

bmj.com will have a new “look and feel” come January 2007, provided by New York interactive agency, Digital Pulp. After that comes a range of new features. This is where you come in.

With the Digital Pulp presentation on Web 2.0 ringing in my ears, I sit down to prepare my presentation on Interaction and Community for the Big Outside (Non-Medical) Publisher. Digital Pulp told us that whereas Web 1.0 was based on a publishing model, Web 2.0 is based on a model of participation. It’s a world where upload is as important as download.

Without too much headscratching, I can think of the following interactive features we’ve introduced on bmj.com over the years – rapid responses (1998), polls (1998), debates(1998), choosing theme issue topics by public consultation (2000), interactive case reports (2003), Q&A (2003), webchats (2003), blogs (2004), and BMJ audio (this September). Rapid responses have also been pretty potent sources of user generated content, that other favourite of the web 2.0 crowd. We’ve posted 60 000 rapid responses, compared with 50 000 articles, on the site to date. So were we Web 2.0 avant la lettre? more…