Medscape Makes RSS Feeds Available!.

Medscape Jumps into RSS

"I am really happy to announce that Medscape, the leading news, information, research and CME site for Physicians on the Internet has joined the RSS revolution. We are now publishing RSS feeds of our headlines in each specialty for which we have a home page. And if you really want the full picture of what's going on in medicine, you can subscribe to a full site feed that syndicates just about every article, news story and CME program that is published.

This is a direct result of my experiments here in weblogs, as well as interactions I've had with the 'Doc Bloggers' in the column to the right. Admittedly, we are one of the few sites that rely on getting people to look at our content on our site launching this feature (and outside of technology-oriented sites, you can probably count the major media participants on one hand), and are certainly the first serious medical resource to do so.

So why aren't we afraid that publishing an RSS feed will actually lead to less traffic on our site? It comes down to this...we believe in the quality of our content. We know there is nowhere else on the Internet where you can get the same timeliness, focus and professional quality of medical information. If you are a doctor (or you are interested in medical information), our RSS feed is the best way to stay up to date on what we are publishing, and you will invariably want to visit our site to see the whole story." [Tales of Hoffman]

Add Mescape to the "ClueTrained-In" column!

Remember - RSS doesn't have to be a supplement for site visitors; it can easily be a complementary channel. Congratulations to Steve and Medscape for taking the long view! I truly believe this will benefit them in the long run, and I hope Steve will be able to provide us with periodic updates.

[The Shifted Librarian]

This is important for a number of reasons not least of which, from my perspective, is that in the medical professional we have a group of people for whom the classification of knowledge feeds isn't going to be a nice-to-have but a must-have.

These people are going to have so much information pushed at them that it is going to be essential that they can intelligently organise the streams into useful knowledge bases.