On Sept. 26, 2012, I did a little behind the scene tweaking to my blog, which now celebrates its seventh month on the air. (I love it.)

I created a subdomain, which means my blog name is now tied to my web site of www.rudyfoto.com. All past links and references to my blog URL (https://rudyowensblog.wordpress.com) will now be linked by my blog URL (http://iwonderandwander.rudyfoto.com). Nothing else has changed. I wanted to link my blogging more with my web site. I also, in the next month or two, plan to reboot my web site and rebuild it to highlight my photography and multimedia in a more user-friendly format. Stay tuned for that.

On an upbeat note, the University of Washington School of Public Health has linked to this blog on its page for prospective new students. I was not expecting that, but it was very refreshing and positive to see. There are some other great bloggers listed there. Way to go public health bloggers, you are the future. For instance, here is how the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health promotes its bloggers, including students (wow, that is a heckuva long name for a school — and I am a UNC-CH alum who took classes there back when I was studying journalism in 1991-93.)

My thinking remains that blogging and other social media tools must be embraced by the field of public health to communicate to wider audiences and to share research from behind the firewall, which prevents the public from accessing many peer-reviewed research articles, where public health traditionally seeks validation and where the field encourages its professionals to publish. To that end, I am confident it will be future graduates of schools like the UW School of Public Health who will create change and transformation in the field to make the concepts and value of public health more accessible and meaningful to the mainstream public and policy-makers.