'Round the Sphere: Coffee and Gossip

I like learning the personal interests of bloggers in the Pharma Blogospehere.

Just recently, for example, I learned that Steve Woodruff over at Impactiviti blog is a coffee connoisseur!

"...I can say that I have just had the best coffee I'VE ever enjoyed in New Jersey..."

Not being a resident of NJ, I can't say whether or not this is faint praise. But the place where he got his coffee is in Lambertville, which is just across the river from me. Since I am just now running out of my Bucks County (PA) Coffee -- the best coffee I have ever enjoyed in PA! -- I thought I'd head on over to Lambertville for dinner and pick up some of that NJ coffee along the way!

Meanwhile, Peter Rost is continuing to burn up NRx's bandwidth with off-topic posts and shameless self-promotion. Other bloggers than myself, including Pharm Aid, are getting fed up with it:

"Since coming to Brandweek NRx, I have received so many self-promotional e-mails from Rost I almost started filtering him," says Pharm Aid, "...but then thought better of it. I've decided to blog about his self-promotion..." You can see the latest post here.

Rost himself continues to "interview" bloggers in this space -- preceded, of course, with a grandiose announcement. His latest interview is with "Jack Friday," aka Insider, at PharmaGossip (see "THE MAN BEHIND PHARMAGOSSIP").

"Jack Friday is a British male, in his 50s, and he has spent his career in the pharma industry," says Rost. "In fact, he’s worked for both Schering-Plough and GlaxoSmithKline, and he still makes his living working for the drug industry."

Boring! Tell us something we all don't already know!

I find it more interesting that Jack Friday is a diehard Chicago Cubs fan.

BTW, Jack states "I know I can trust [Rost] to protect my identity."

Ha! Have you read the Question Authority "TERMS OF USE AGREEMENT AND PRIVACY POLICY"?

Oh, I forgot. NRx is not Question Authority...NOT!

"Flaky" PharmaCentral Launched!

Far from "flaky" is Steve Woodruff's new PharmaCentral PageFlake index to the Pharma Blogosphere. Here's what he has to say:

The concept is built on what John Mack has done by creating the pharma blogosphere site, who gets credit for pulling a bunch of links together, and promoting the whole idea of pharma blogging as something of a "collective effort."

What I've done is to try to make it easier to visualize and access the blogs, with a further attempt to categorize them by emphasis.

Check it out at: http://www.pageflakes.com/pharmacentral/

Today is the first day it is publicly accessible. I would very much like to have your feedback on a couple of things in particular:

• whether you feel your blog is properly classified in the tabbed categories (note: each blog will be assigned to only one category)
• whether you think the categories need to be altered to any extent to improve the classification
• whether you feel, over time, that other blogs should be included (note: I plan to include those that have a track record of at least 3 months of solid content, and that focus pretty specifically on pharma/biotech)

[Peter Rost - your blog does not have a publicly accessible "feed", so I did not include Question Authority. But your newsworthy posts get so much attention at the other blogs that you seem omnipresent anyway!]

I made this portal because, while it is very valuable to go to each individual site, it's time-consuming and inconvenient. Feed readers are great (I use Google's), but the interface isn't ideal. PageFlakes enables a more compelling visualization and ease of access. Readers can come to one site and jump off to articles of interest from there.

By having an umbrella site like this, I hope we can all gain additional exposure, and help a growing number of other folks to keep up on the latest commentary.

Let me know your thoughts!

I really like the "flakes." If my experience is any guide, I'd say this is a work in progress -- maybe the classification needs some work. It's really difficult to classify blogs in the Pharma Blogosphere and I'm sure Steve will get some criticism. After all, you can please some bloggers some of the time, and all bloggers some of the time, but you can you can't please all bloggers all the time!