The Greenville Health System has launched a metablog that aggregates content from blogs within its system.  A blog of blogs.  Despite following a number of large medical institutions, this is something that I haven’t seen executed.   It raises questions about strategy versus function with regard to information.

As Google punishes replicated content – how does this impact search?  And when search brings an interested reader onto the meta site, have you lost the opportunity of having the reader exposed to the focal area of interest served by the primary blog?  Is there a dilution effect that’s unintended?

As fragmented content at medical schools and hospital systems scale up, central aggregation may have a future.  I wonder if there’s merit in exploring the development of a lifestream of sorts that goes beyond blogs?

I’ll leave it for the communication wonks to sort out.

The Greenville Healthcare System metablog is the work of Jason Pleakis and Bobby Rettew.