# 2859
(screen shot of top of New Media Page)
There is a new url to add to your bookmarks this morning, as the HHS (Health and Human Services) has unveiled their first iteration of their New Media Website.
The front page describes the site this way:
As promised, the first iteration of our newmedia.hhs.gov Web site. It's really meant to start your creative juices flowing but it's also practical. The content covers the tools used in the new media peanut recall campaign mounted with great success by FDA, CDC and HHS. The page is delivered by RSS (it emanates from CDC); the FDA Recall Twitter is fed by a widget, and the CDC disease incidence map is another widget. Best of all, we are rolling out a threaded discussion feature that let's you vote ideas up or down! So tell us what you want and need from our Center for New Media and our newmedia site
New Media, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a broad term that encompasses many emerging ways to communicate ideas and information via the Internet.
Among these are podcasts, videos, blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, widgets and badges, online conferences, RSS feeds, downloadable `toolkits', text messages, and email.
And increasingly, instead of simply disseminating information out through a digital pipeline, these venues are providing for a two-way conversation.
The HHS (which runs a `family' of 11 agencies, including the CDC, FDA, and NIH) is actively looking for your input on how they are doing, and what they could be doing better.
Currently they are asking for suggestions on how to improve their pandemicflu.gov site, and have opened up a conversation on the New Media site (see Join the discussion!)
The HHS is also engaged in a two-way conversation on Twitter, with AndrewPWilson being their social media front man. Follow him, and give him a shout out.
You'll find a list of Twitter feeds in my sidebar for the HHS, the CDC, FDA, FEMA and others. By following these agencies you'll receive real-time, often vital, informational `tweets'.
You can help these agencies disseminate vital information by `retweeting' important information, thereby increasing the `viral' spread of message.
All of this hasn't just happened overnight.
The HHS took a bold early step in this direction two years ago with their 5-week Pandemic Leadership Blog event. The results are archived online, and if you haven't visited that site, I encourage you to do so.
Fair warning, though. Pack a lunch.
There are more than three dozen blog entries (including a few by your's truly), and probably 1,000 comments. At times, quite frankly, the `conversation' became heated.
But to the HHS's credit, no attempt was made to influence what the bloggers wrote or to muzzle the commenters.
Tens of thousands of visitors hit the site during the 5-week experiment, and more have visited the archives over the ensuing 2 years.
Based on this early success, former HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt caught the blogging bug, and produced dozens of quality blogs over the last 18 months of his service.
New Media is all about the message, and finding ways to deliver it clearly, and effectively. And much of it is still in the experimental stage.
Ten years ago, nobody knew what a blog was.
Today, there are millions of them across the Internet. Twitter came into existence in 2006, but really only caught on in 2008. Widgets and badges (you'll see a couple of examples in my sidebar) are also relatively new.
Some of it will work, some of it may end up abandoned in the digital scrap heap - replaced by better technology and new ideas over time.
History has taught us that the only thing constant about the Internet is change.
But whatever direction all of this leads to, it is nice to see the HHS taking the lead. Not content with playing it safe - they are pushing the envelope, seeing what works and what doesn't, and taking a risk or two.
That's how progress is made.
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