I was nominated as one of the Finalists in the Medgadget Annual Medical Weblogs Awards, which is akin to the Oscars of the Medical Blogging world. I had started this blog mid-November, and in fact, as of today, it is just 3 months old! In the course of this short span of time, my blog has received tremendous attention, first, thanks to wordpress.com’s Blogger Buddy program, and second, due to the nomination by Medgadget. Consequently, after just 3 months of blogging, I have hit the first big milestone of blogging: 10,000 hits!

I was selected by MedGadget as one of the Best New Medical Weblog (Established in 2010) and I was in the running with some really big contenders. I thought that it was going to be a no show as the bigger and spankier blogs like ZDoggMD (who eventually won the prize), and Celebrity Diagnosis would take the cream. As it turned out, I raced Z to the very end and the voting came down right to the wire until the final few hours when Zee rushed ahead of me and pipped me to the post by 72 votes (a healthy margin that!) and I lost 507 votes to 579 votes. However, considering the fact that at that time, I just had my blog buddies and some word-of-Facebook/Twitter popularity (which is still pretty much the same!), in comparison to Z, whose FB page alone has 600+ fans, it was no mean show! Anyways, I congratulate him for the dedicated run, and I pride myself in not letting him run away with it. And a special thank you to my blog buddies who voted for me, campaigned for me, and in general out up with me ranting and raving from time to time!

However, in the course of the week of voting, I did stuff that I am not proud of. Now while I did not exactly go to the extents Zee did to get his votes:

http://twitter.com/#!/zdoggmd/status/37360793641033728

nonetheless, I slipped up. On several counts:

1. The whole week I was so obsessed with the voting and the numbers that though I was relatively free that week, I did not blog at all. The primary reason for me to open this blog up was to write, daily, if possible. Yet, the desire to win overcame my primary objective, and I lost focus on the important thing to do: BLOG. In hindsight, I feel a little ashamed, especially seeing how folks like EmCrit, who got selected in multiple categories, still kept chugging on ahead. Point to learn.
2. I wanted this blog to be semi-anonymous, not revealing my identity per se. But when I saw my ass being handed to me on a platter by the Zeeheads, I could not take it anymore: I jumped in with my 1200 strong platoon of Facebook friends. They did help me out, but at the cost of my semi-anonymity: I am now hoping that after sometime, when the dust finally settles, I will get back to the anonymity that I arose from!
3. I neglected my Blog Buddies. The very same people who put me up in the map for the first time: I became uncaring towards them. I have so much catching up to do, that the mind boggles: 300+ unread mails in the inbox from all the great people buddying up with me. I am trying my best to catch up as fast as possible, but with the week from hell right up on me, I am not too sure how this will go down. I am really very sorry folks, but please give me some time, I promise I will clear the back log and will be back pestering you all in no time. On a related note, check out this post to contact me if you wanna be the next one to be reviewed by me when I next get some time. Remember how I reviewed the works of Casey, Stacey and Lisa (DePressed) before? So, if you wanna be the next one to be dissected, please feel free to hit me up on the contact form in the page!
4. The Post A Day Challenge. I knew from the very first day that I would not be able to manage posting everyday, but I wanted to make up by posting more frequently on days I ended up having some free time on my hands. Since I like working offline when I get some time, I use the Windows Live Writer to compose and save posts, and also since I do not have access to the Internet at all times, I end up writing a lot of drafts on WLW (especially the research paper oriented posts, which I try to screen and re-edit before publishing on the blog). Now, as I write I see 17, yes seventeen half-finished posts, drafts, which could have been easily written up last week. Now I am in the midst of a hurricane fortnight: work pressures have sky-rocketed, I am writing up a couple of research proposals which are consuming enormous amounts of my time, a couple of Blogger Meets this weekend to keep me tied up, and a Critical Care conference/workshop next week to hone my skill-set…and on top of that, I plan to make some change in my career directions (more on that later sometime, once I have taken a definitive step). So, I am pretty sure it is going to take some mean catch up work to be done in order to get those posts written up, follow and read my buddies’ works, and such stuff.

Times are getting interesting, eh? 🙂