The new BMJ Learning site launched at the end of September, with a major redesign. It’s the result of a year of work from developers, editors, and marketing staff, and represents one of the leading online destinations for continuing medical education.

The most obvious change is a fresher look, which, as well as being visually appealing, reflects modern thinking about web design, with an emphasis on accessibility and usability. The new site is also much more dynamic, with lists of popular modules updating to reflect how visitors are using the site, and editor’s picks covering topical issues such as revalidation.

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Google started rolling out the ‘+1’ recommend button across its own portfolio and third-party web sites just a day after Twitter unveiled its new ‘follow’ button. Both releases are being viewed as direct competitors to Facebook’s popular ‘like’ button.

Central to an effort by companies to stake out their claim in the social-networking domain and encourage ordinary ‘surfers’ to be more engaged with their products, the tools also facilitate the collection of detailed user behaviour data and have obvious benefits for online advertising. The suite of Web 2.0 buttons featured on most websites has grown steadily over the past few years (you may well have noticed) and sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are long-term residents. But the success of Facebook’s ‘like’ button has spurred others to get in on the game. Afterall, it is said to appear on more than a third of the 1,000 most popular websites and apparently the average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic. more…

BMJ Journals offer users a variety of options to organise their site experience for maximum personal efficiency. These functions are freely available to individual members/subscribers and to registered users.

My folders
‘My folders’ is a personalised online filing system for registered users. The ‘My folders’ feature lets you add particular papers to a personal archive that you can revisit later. You can create subfolders within your personal archive area that let you organise articles by topic, discipline, author, or any other categorisation that strikes your fancy.  Articles can be re-organised at any time, according to your needs. You can easily save them to more than one folder by using the copy function.

To start using folders, just click the new ‘My folders’ button on the right-hand side of any page (underneath Email alerts, Twitter and Facebook) or select “Add article to my folders” from an article view (see screenshot below).

Saved searches
Also within the ‘My folder’ area is the ‘Saved searches’ functionality, which allows you to save a particular search query for use later on, and organise the saved searches within your personal folder hierarchy. Just click the ‘Save this search to my folders’ button on any search result (see screenshot below). 

Managing your folders
Entering your registered username and password after clicking on the ‘My folders’ button will enable you to use the folders service at any time. Articles can be re-organised according to your needs, by creating new folders and moving or copying articles around. Please note that the folders work across all BMJ Journals, so you can save articles from multiple titles.