The first issue of 6minutes went out on this day in 2006. What started out as a small medical newsletter emailed out three times a week, has now matured into a daily up-to-the-minute update on everything medical that is delivered to almost ten thousand doctors around Australia – and still growing. We also get thousands of hits on our website, www6minutes.com.au, every week.
So I guess we’re getting something right.
We started out as refugees from print publications wanting to bring medical publishing into the era of “Web 2.0”. It’s been an interesting learning curve for me personally, switching from a weekly print publication to a daily online presence – and credit must go to our backroom team of technical and design staff (see picture) for making it possible.
As I said in my initial introduction to 6minutes, we wanted to take advantage of all the new possibilities of digital and online media such as video (Youtube), blogs and instant feedback. Well, we’ve certainly done that but I think there’s still a lot more we could do in that direction. I’d like to make more use of video and podcasts, for example, and have a more flexible and user friendly comments system – and there are technical changes in the pipeline to make these possible.
What I think 6minutes has done most effectively is bring the latest development in clinical medicine and health politics to you as they happen. A week is a long time in politics – especially when policy is being made on the run – so it’s good to be able to report on events as they unfold, and give you chance to comment and put them in perspective on the same day as they occur. In the case of Dr Mohamed Haneef, for example, we were speaking to doctors at the Gold Coast Hospital who didn’t yet know why there was a posse of TV camera crews at the main gate and the switchboard was going into meltdown.
We’ve also followed on the growth in popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, which many younger doctors and medical students are now using as a means of keeping in contact with each other. The next trend, if you believe the gurus, are sites like Twitter on which you can follow the activities of your friends on an hour by hour basis.
But none of this replaces face to face contact, and it has been good to come out and meet you at events as varied as the AMA annual conference, the GPCE as well as local meetings and press briefings.
We look forward to seeing more of you in 2008 and to introducing more innovations in 6minutes.
The first 
