Tales of Hoffman

Medical Blog "Grand Rounds"

It's that time of week again...head over to Kevin, MD's blog for this week's Medical Blog Grand Rounds, a cornucopia of yummy medical blog goodness.

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! ;-)

Medscape Nurses Gets its "Props"

Kudos to Susan Yox, the editor of Medscape's Nursing site, and all the readers of that fine site for getting the recognition they deserve from American Medical News. Susan posted a plea for medical textbooks to be donated to Iraq and the online community has responded beyond everyone's best expectations. It's nice to not only do well, but also do good -- at the same time. Here's a quick excerpt from the article:

Dr. Gifford, who was now in touch with Dr. Garza, included Dr. Yox in their e-mails, and in the summer of 2003, an article about the book drive was posted on the Medscape Nurses site. The company also made a donation of 3,000 copies of Scientific American Medicine and ACS Surgery.

The article brought an avalanche of responses. Dr. Gifford paid for a couple of small shipments himself before realizing that the scale of donations would quickly tap him dry. He started calling military friends and found that officials at Fort Bragg, N.C., were willing to fly out more than 2,000 volumes donated by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York on a space-available basis. Fort Bragg shipped another six pallets of medical journals donated by Merck Frosst Canada.

Here's the link to the full article.

Medical Blog Grand Rounds and Medscape: Perfect Together?

Kudos to Nick and the whole Medical Blog world for thinking up (and even more important, actually doing) the idea of Medical Blog Grand Rounds (here's the most recent installment). Basically, each week the writers of Medical Blogs around the net send in their submissions of thier best posts in the last week and a rotating team of bloggers edits them into a tasty smorgasboard of medical blog deliciousness. It's really quite compelling.

So, I got to thinking (always dangerous)...I've always been looking for a way to support the medical bloggers out there and the best thing I can offer is "flow." I've never been able to quite figure out how to best create that flow of people from Medscape to individual blogs, but this is a real obvious opportunity.

I've been corresponding with Nick about republishing the Grand Rounds on Medscape each week, where we have the large amount of medical professionals coming to find out what's going on in the world of medicine every day. We're sensitive to not stealing the thunder of the medical bloggers who are putting in time to author and host these Grand Rounds, so here's a thought.

The Grand Rounds authors continue to rotate and do their normal thing, posting on Tuesday. Medscape won't "re-post" until Thursday and we'll put a line at the top of the article that says something like, "This week's Grand Rounds is moderated by Nicholas Genes at Blogborygmi", plus the writer gets an author's byline on Medscape.

I think that should allow the Grand Round authors/hosters to benefit both the initial rush that will come from docs and lay readers who are already tuned into the blog world, while still reaping the benefit of exposing Grand Rounds to the huge universe of people who still have no idea of all the good stuff that's out there. For Medscape, it's a great way to point at the best content out in the medical blogosphere while supporting some of our most forward looking members.

Jacob has also offered to republish Grand Rounds on his incredibly useful Medlogs.com aggregator. That makes perfect sense as well. I think something this valuable should be whereever potential readers are.

Yes? No? Maybe So? Comments?

Is Starbucks a Pusher?

Great...Hot on the heels of a move to have caffeine withdrawal officially added to the DSM-IV, comes news that not only does Starbucks coffee deliver three times more caffeine than No-Doz, but they're also planning to raise their prices. It may be time to set up an intervention for my wife...

Experimenting...

I'm messing around these days with the combination of my Treo PhoneCam and Flickr, which seems pretty darn cool. Just in case you are wondering what's up with the occasionally random photo, like the one below from over the weekend, that shows up. I may eventually split off a "moblog" site from this one, but I'm not sure I'm much of a moblogger yet, so for now bear with me and let me know what you think.

At the Metrostars game...