Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Ten years and counting

Englemed Health and Medical News went live on August 8th 1997.

Our news stories came from Australia, London, Scotland, Finland and Europe.

It wasn't the first news service on the web but it may have been the first specialist service of its kind. There was certainly little happening in Britain and it was a couple of years before the BBC launched a fully fledged web news service.

We'd spotted that the web was an ideal medium for health and medical issues. People around the world share the same concerns and interests when it comes to staying alive and being healthy.

We also wanted to bring our experience of newspaper journalism to the web. There are many more sophisticated ways now of achieving the kind of lay-out which we trialled - but

When it started we had our own ideas about how it would develop. We thought it would be stand-alone news site with paying subscribers and adverts.

That's not what happened for we went on to forge partnerships with a number of other sites, most notably doctors.net.uk.

During the internet bubble of 1999-2000, we avoided the temptation to seek to raise large amounts of cash and develop ambitious and unrealistic business plans. Instead we concentrated on the business of journalism, pioneering packages of reports from a number of major conferences.

We're British based but have always been international with links and clients in countries as diverse as Australia, Denmark, Canada and the USA.

We now think of Englemed as a news portal, bringing together a number of specialist sites, all sharing a common interest in providing users with a good quality and distinctive news service.

We're going to post our original pages from 1997. Looking back you get a clue as to how much the world has changed in just ten years.

However although people call blogs like this Web2, they're harking back to the original spirit which enabled individuals to branch out and test new ideas. So on to the next ten years!

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