Creating and Assessing a Subject-based Blog for Current Awareness within a Cancer Care Environment

The Grey Horizon Blog was created in April 2012 using Blogger. The selection and re-aggregation of information involves ongoing assessment of user needs and continuous work on the Blog. A weekly global email-digest listing of the postings will be distributed two months after the launch.Several metrics will be employed in October 2012 to evaluate the Blog. Blogger itself tracks the number of page-views over time. Google Analytics was set up as it tracks additional information on access and use of the Blog. As clients may be using feed readers to read Blog entries and may thus not visit the Blog at all, Feedburner has also been incorporated to track the number of times that the Blog RSS is accessed, as well as calculating the number of subscribers.A post-survey will be conducted in six months to complement the web statistics data. The additional feedback and comments will help us determine whether the Blog has successfully created an easy platform for users to keep current with unpublished literature, the type of resources found most important, and whether the amount of time spent maintaining the Blog met expectations.