'Round the Sphere: Pharmalot Goes Green, Pharma Gossip Goes BBQ, Drug Wonks Just Go Berserk!

Ed Silverman has been busy over the weekend. Like most of us he probably spent some quality time with his family and lawn, but be also managed to launch a makeover of his blog, Pharmalot.


Pharmalot now sports a new green glow and offers several new features and improvements, according to Ed:

- More visibility for comments;
- More links to the rest of the Internet;
- Easier to find entries, and new topic pages;
- Enhanced archives;
- Easier-to-follow comment discussions;
- Smaller file sizes;
- Easier-to-use Anonymous Tips link;
- Lighter colors and bigger type;
- No mediciney taste!

I especially like the new color scheme, larger font, and the fact that recent comments are highlighted in the right hand column. I predict that this will encourage more people to post comments, which will make Ed even busier!

There's also a calendar that allows you to look at archives by day, rather than by month. This is very useful since Ed makes several posts per day.

Anyway, good luck Ed!

Meanwhile, Jack Friday over at PharmaGossip also initiated a bit of a makeover. Insider, however, only went so far as to pimp the logo as soon below:

Will we see more PharmaGossip logo variations a la Google?

Have you used Cafe Pharma's Pharmagather lately? If you have, you will have noticed something weird. Here's a screen shot I took this morning (click on it to enlarge it):

Notice how many times DrugWonks appears. You might think these are all new posts because that's how pharmagather works -- it lists posts from several blogs in reverse chronological order. This helps us find the most recent posts mad in the Pharma Blogosphere^TM.

But if you look more closely at the DrugWonks entries, most of them are labeled "posted 75 minutes ago." Actually, most of these were posted several days ago!

So, what's the big deal? Well, just as on search engine pages, visitors to Pharmagather are not going to scroll down too far to access posts made to other blogs. DrugWonks is dominating the top positions on the Pharmagather page even though there aren't that many recent posts being made to the blog! This unfairly hogs the limelight.

This could have been a fluke, but I just checked and again DrugWonks dominates the top positions.

Either DrugWonks has found a way to game the system used by Pharmagather -- such as "republishing" old posts -- or there is something wrong with DrugWonks' feed.

Whatever the problem, I wish Pharmagather would fix it!