Richard was diagnosed with diabetes in November. (Hopefully, the beer and sugar he’s cutting back on isn’t what fuels his writing.) Tonight’s post, which is a quick review of health information sites deployed with Web 2.0 traits, is no doubt being spurred by some personal research.

I’m always interested to see posts related to the field of online wellness, especially when they come from smart end-users. But I hate the label [Health 2.0]. We haven’t seen sufficient innovation or even interest in the category to suggest we’re experiencing any kind of next generation momentum.

Getting there means addressing three topics:

1. Reliability
The sites mentioned in both Frank’s and Richard’s posts generally do a good job presenting health information results. But all of them have a long way to go before they gain the trust that WebMD has earned. Interface improvement alone isn’t enough to make health information more useful.

2. Trust
Sites like DailyStrength have updated the idea of the online support group by turning discussion boards into social networks. It’s a great experiment, but your personal health status is not social. The personal nature of the topic means community members maintain a great deal of anonymity. How do you trust the advice generated by anonymous members? Think Fight Club.

3. Motivation
We’ve done a lot of work with personal health assessment / tracking devices. The issue with these is that nobody wants to use them. We’ve been providing these services to large organizations like the NYC DOH for four years now, and participation depends very heavily on outside motivation (e.g., cash).

Make it past these issues, and you’ve got something worth a label. The positive here is that the field is wide open. If you have ideas, the web could use them.