Medical Web 2.0 Guidance Packages

How to keep yourself up-to-date in medicine?

The amount of medical information is growing rapidly online and it's getting harder to keep yourself up-to-date in your field. We help you save time and effort.

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Step 5: Aggregators III., Bloglines, Netvibes or Google Reader?

Some people don't want to use web browsers or desktop-based softwares for reading news and articles so they choose the easily accessible web-based feed readers which are hosted on remote servers. As the application is available on the Web, it can be accessed anywhere by a user with an Internet connection.

If you want to compare these aggregators to each other, Techcrunch has a nice feature comparison chart.

Advantages

You can access it from anywhere with an Internet connection
You don't need to install anything on your computer.
Your feeds will always be synchronized.
No storage required to archive a lot of your subscription content.

The examples include the following services.

Google Reader

Google Reader is a comprehensive web-based RSS feed reader with a flexible labeling system. It makes it easier to share items of your feeds as well.

The labeling system allows you to group your subscriptions. You can also tag and organize individual items of your feeds.

If you want to add a new feed to your Google Reader account, just click on the Add subscription button.

Insert the link of the new feed:

And now Google Reader will help you by delivering its news and articles automatically.

Google Reader in Plain English

And a video tutorial about the service:

Bloglines

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. It lets you make a customized news page containing RSS feeds of articles, blogs, images, videos and audio.

When you click on the Add button, the procedure of adding a new feed to your list is just the same as with other similar services.

The procedure on video:

PageFlakes

PageFlakes is a site organized into tabs containing user-selected modules (so-called Flakes).

Each Flake varies in content; so you can add several types of information channels to your own Flake:

Photos
Notes
Search
Bookmarks
Events
Weather
RSS Feeds
Podcasts
Videos
Calendar
To-do lists

If you want to read the feeds your are subscribed to, click on the Reader button on the main menu.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a Yahoo! web application that lets users aggregate information from different sources. Users can also set up rules for how that content should be filtered.

A tutorial to the service:

And this video, a screencast helps you how to subscribe to a feed:

Netvibes

Netvibes is a multi-lingual personalized start page organized into tabs, with each tab containing user-defined modules. The features include

RSS/Atom feed reader
local weather forecasts
a calendar supporting iCal
bookmarks
notes
to-do lists
multiple searches
e-mail providers
Delicious
Flickr photos
podcast support

You can also share your feeds and items with others.

Here is a tour of Netvibes features.

How to keep yourself up-to-date in medicine?

The amount of medical information is growing rapidly online and it's getting harder to keep yourself up-to-date in your field. We help you save time and effort.

Share |