WebProNews

Yahoo! has launched a blog portal dedicated to health with Yahoo! Health Expert Blogs featuring advice and topical discussions on everything from yoga to asthma.

Experts in the medical fields pertaining to yoga, nutrition, diabetes, depression, heart disease, breast cancer, allergies, and dermatology post their thoughts and advice and allow readers to pick their brains. Though the service is free and includes RSS feeds, registration is required.

Just about all of the experts cited hail from some extension of Johns Hopkins University, except for maybe Yoga guru Rodney Yee who, in his latest contribution, speaks on using yoga as a means to deal with the stress of family reunions.

Cheryl Koch of Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center offers her thoughts on a new food pyramid on the Nutrition and Weight Loss thread while also providing tips on exercise.

On down the page, you'll find Dr. David Neubauer, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, regaling readers with his obsession with Stephen Sondheim musicals.

Some in the search industry say this is a whole new strategy on the part of Yahoo! to corner a whole area of expert advice blogs, ranging from travel to technology. Others doubt the effectiveness of the strategy for building traffic as the blogs would only be updated about twice a week.

Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.