Tales of Hoffman

My Yahoo Officially Adds RSS

After a bunch of months where RSS in My Yahoo was basically in a Beta state, the big rollout has finally occurred and Yahoo is embracing RSS in a big, big way. They've basically opened up My Yahoo so that you can add any RSS feed alongside their normal content modules, so now My Yahoo is finally "MY YAHOO" not "Yahoo's version of some of what I would like to have in My Yahoo" ;-)

This is a great move by Yahoo and, once again, a step in the right direction of expanding RSS beyond the small audience it has had so far.

I did have one question, that maybe someone out there can answer because I can't find any place to submit this question on Yahoo...Any idea why it won't work with the Medscape RSS feeds that have Upper Case characters in their URL (http://www.medscape.com/cx/rssfeeds/Cardiology.xml) but works fine with Medscape RSS feeds that are all lower case (http://www.medscape.com/cx/rssfeeds/news.xml)?

Posted that one to Jeremy Zawodny's blog here, but I'm not sure he appreciates receiving Yahoo bug reports on his blog. :-)

BloggerCon III: You Guys Have Fun Without Me!

Enoch writes to find out if I'm going to attend BloggerCon III. Seems as though he's leading a Medical Blog session. Unforutnately, it's "no go" for me on this one. Too long a trip when there's just too much family stuff going on. Being the Fall and all between all three kids finally in school (Spencer in Kindergarten? Woah!), weekend soccer games (I'm coaching this year), etc. I just don't think I can pull it off.

I will say, however, that if you are involved in Medicine and have a blog (or are thinking of starting one), you should try to make it to BloggerCon III. I went to the first one and it was a blast. Met some great people and learned a lot. And Enoch will be a great moderator. Someone go, keep him honest, and let me know how it turns out!

Healthcare News in RSS

Kudos to my colleagues at WebMD.com, the best site on the internet for patient-oriented healthcare information. They've finally joined the RSS Revolution by providing a feed for the news stories that come out of their Atlanta-based news bureau. It's good stuff for patients, always medically reviewed and probably something your should put into your newsreader...pronto.

Of course, you can always get a ton of healthcare news written for physicians and other healthcare providers in over 25 specialty-specific feeds over at Medscape.

This Live Meeting is a Live Meeting!

I've been talking lately about how at Medscape we are adding more and more "live events" to our menu of CME. Well, tonight's live event is really a LIVE EVENT! What I mean is that we are going to be Video webcasting a CME event as it happens from the NY Palace Hotel tonight at 7pm. Created in conjunction with the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Optimal Strategies for the Multidisciplinary Management of Prostate Cancer will feature some of the latest thinking on treating Prostate Cancer. This is part of a huge package of coverage and CME programs on Medscape that are coinciding with PCF's Report to the Nation on Prostate Cancer. Come check it out tonight at 7pm EST if you are available, or use the URL at any time after tonight to see an archive webstream of the full presentation.

Pathology R Us

A few Medscape notes this morning: Last night we launched our newest specialty home page -- Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. This is really cool since we are creating this page in conjunction with the American Society for Clinical Pathology. All you Pathologists out there should come check it out. We'll soon be offering special CME credits for Lab Medicine and will be covering the upcoming meeting in October. And if you are not a Pathologist, but watch CSI, you'll probably like it too! ;-)

DirecTV to Beam 1500 HDTV Channels

Holy Cannoli! According to this press release (via Gizmodo), by next year (NEXT YEAR!) DirecTV will have the necessary equipment circling the earth to offer more than 500 local channels in HDTV. And by 2007, they'll have the capacity for 1,000 HDTV locals and 150 HDTV National networks.

I hope they're offering a larger capacity HD Tivo by then! I'm gonna need it. ;-)

Iconitis & Typepad Design Changes

There's lots of talk around the web design world about re-designs and whether they are truly needed in many cases. I noticed this morning as I was posting the entry below that it seems like Typepad rolled out some little design tweaks in the last day or so. Let me say right up front that I think, in general, Typepad is very well designed and I've rarely had a problem getting stuff done using it. But, at least one of the new changes is suspect to me.

Above the "Post Body" text entry box there have always been a series of nice little circles with markup functionality behind them (i.e., add a link, bold, italics, blockquote, etc.). They were very clearly labeled and I never had any problem either finding them or understanding what each one did.

Today those buttons are gone, sadly replaced by icons. It's a small thing, but I've been looking at those circles with complete understanding for over a year now and today I had to actually mouse over the icons to understand what they are meant for. Oh, the bold and italics are understandable since they are the same icons you see in every app, but the "insert file"? I was completely clueless.

It would be great to get an answer to this question....Were those changes spurred on by some problems that showed up in customer feedback or user testing? Or did someone wake up one morning and say, "Gee, it would be nice to make those things into icons..."

Dell Ordering is "Broken"

One of my submissions was picked up by Mark's This is Broken yesterday. Go take a look; it's a funny story (and there are some interesting supporting comments in there too!).

Low-Carb Diets and Adolescents

It's another Medscape Live CME WebConference event, and it's tonight! Drop by at 7:00pm Eastern and say hello, I'll be lurking in the "control room" looking at audience questions as they come in. Right now, it looks like an interesting presentation and you'll earn a few CME credits as well.