Medscape tries "Podcasting"

The latest craze (at least as far as the Net is concerned) is "Podcasting" -- a combination of RSS feeds, news readers/aggregators that can download RSS enclosures, and mobile (or not) MP3 players, such as iPods (or any other portable MP3 players, including Windows Media Player on your desktop). The best explanation I can give is that once you put all the pieces together, it's like you are subscribing to audio programming and can listen to what you want on the go. A great introduction to the concept (as well as links to a bunch of software and feeds) can be found at www.ipodder.org.

Some medical bloggers have recently commented on the trend (Enoch here and Bill here and here) and I've been tracking it as well, and have decided to leap in. I'm now (pre-)announcing "Medscape Audio," an RSS feed with MP3 enclosures of material from the Medscape site. At launch, we've put in our weekly editorials from Dr. George Lundberg (these are pretty short at around 90 seconds each, but very compelling and thought provoking). This week, we'll be adding the audio from our most recent live webcast event titled Long-term Dietary Interventions: Effects on Weight Loss and Health (this one is much longer at around an hour, but it's a fully CME-certified event). I'm looking into adding audio versions of our Medscape Medical News on a daily basis as well.

To try it out, point your RSS aggregator (if you don't have one that can handle enclosures, you can get some good ones that interface directly with your ipod or other MP3 player at the ipodder.org site here) at this URL to pick up the Medscape Audio feed: http://www.medscape.com/pages/public/rss/medscape-audio.xml

We're not putting this announcement up on the Medscape site just yet, so you guys have the inside track on this. The only thing I ask is that you let me know how it works for you and if you think the content you are hearing is useful. It seems like the idea of being able to listen to Medscape content while you are "on the go" is a good one, but I'll rely on users like you to let me know.

By the way, for all the folks that Dave is sending over (thanks, Dave!), Medscape's "standard" RSS feeds are the best way to get breaking news for medical professionals in your newsreader! ;-)