The NIH Consensus Development Conference on VBAC has been big news in the Maternal Care Advocacy community. Was this the first NIH conference that alluded to the presence of bloggers? Amy Romano found that mention notable. Here is an interesting picture of the social networks between tweeters who have included #NIHVBAC in their tweets as of this morning, March 10, 2010. Made by Marc Smith, ConnectedAction.net, using NodeXL. Anyone can use this open source tool to make similar network maps.

Note the centrality of tweeters' networks in the NIHVBAC map, compared to a social network map of tweets on the key words "Maternal Mortality" done early last month. Patterns of social networks differ by topic and participants. More to come!