Sorry for this duplicate post. I found out this morning that I was a victim of comment spam (and it was particularly off color as well). In the process of trying to delete the comments, I also deleted this entry from October 8. I guess this is what the Google Cache is for!
My one moment of cogent thought during Day 2 of BloggerCon has been "called out" by Jon Udell in his blog today. In a posting about the difficulty of pointing directly to a spot in a longer streaming media file, Jon points out what he terms "...the most animated five minutes of the whole hour-and-a-half session." That was my mini-rant followed by another attendee's Maxi-rant regarding how RSS and aggregators will never take off until they are somehow made easier to use for the regular user. By the way, I'm the guy who leads off the second clip...without the mustache.
When we launched RSS feeds at Medscape, it was up to me to create the page that explains to physicians what the heck it's all about. That's when it really hit home that it's next to impossible to explain how this all works to people who are not intimately involved in blogging or working on the Net in some other way. I still get emails at least a few times a month that basically say, "This sounds good, but what the heck do I need to do?"
I see three potential ways out of this logjam: 1) Wait for Aggregator vendors and RSS feed developers to come up with a better way to integrate their products so non-technical users can actually use them without getting buried in an avalanche of acronyms, right mouse clicks, and orange and white icons. 2) Wait for Microsoft to build RSS readers/aggregators into IE and/or Outlook. 3)Pursue an idea that came from Jenny at the BloggerCon aggregator session: "pre-filled" news readers/aggregators. I'd be very interested in working with a freeware news reader/aggregator vendor to distribute, through Medscape, a special version of of their software, pre-filled with Medscape's 25+ news feeds to as many doctors as want it (my main candidates? AmphetaDesk and NetNewsWire Lite. Morbus? Brent?).
Who wouldn't want to be able to say that more doctors use their software than any other? So what say you, aggregator vendors. Any takers?
newsgator is a outlook plugin to read rss feeds:
http://www.newsgator.com/
I've put all of the medscape feeds into a publicly available aggregator here:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/medscapenews
Posted by: enoch | October 23, 2003 at 02:05 PM