Health Feed Aggregation

There is a Brobdingnagian amount of health information on the web – becoming more gargantuan every day. So how does one stay informed and on top of ones game in this pixelated world that never sleeps. Textbooks are great for reviewing well-recognized facts and journals great for reviewing research developments (if a tad slow in production). But what of the internet revolution…

RSS feed adoption may have peaked for individual users but aggregators are being used with increasing frequency to supply the ‘caffeinated hit of clip art news’ our cerebra are becoming mare accustomed to.

Alltop Health domain starts the reader off with the top 150 ‘hand picked’ health related blogs and news feeds. The page is huge but feels manageable. For each ‘source’ this health knowledge aggregator provides the latest 5 feeds with scroll-over time-date stamped feed summaries. The colour scheme is easy on the eye and the individual site title icons keep the mind visually focused.

My favorite features are

• The ability to ‘cull’ (sorry ‘HIDE’) the sites you do not wish to follow
• The ‘eclectic’ nature of the information provided – found some fantastic ‘as yet undiscovered blogs’
• Inquisitive exploration out with the confines of ‘health’ is possible (and positively encouraged!)

Thanks to Scienceroll for alerting me to MedicalCavity.com. This site currently provides the latest 10 feed titles of 72 medical and health related news/blog sites. The reader can find medical articles and news feeds from a variety of sources including medical journals, websites, blogs, Flickr images, Youtube videos, del.icio.us tags, and many more. Again the feed articles summary or full text (depending on site) is available as a hover scroll-over.

Overall, the site offers a nice collection of feeds in a user friendly manner using a color scheme which is growing on me rapidly. I would still prefer time-date stamps on hover and the potential to re-order/hide/add sites to the staple collection as per Zeadoo.

MedLogs.com provides a slightly different aggregation service. Founded and maintained by Jacob Reider and Aaron Hall, Medlogs.com subscribes to the best health and medical blogs in the blogosphere. Feeds can be viewed directly from the site or in your own reader. It is great to be able to review time-date stamped feeds divided (‘somewhat crudely’) by generic source content i.e. physicians, nurses, patients, geeks etc

MedWorm.com is a medical RSS feed provider and search engine. It is effectively the Internet’s medical router with over 6000 authoritative RSS feeds going in and hundreds of new RSS feeds by category being created. Sources include medical journals, government organizations, medical associations and medical blogs. MedWorm users can subscribe to RSS feeds based on medical categories via the site itself (e.g. Emergency Medicine), or they can use another RSS reader if they choose. Unlike the other sites reviewed here, Medworm is searchable – searches may be filtered by news, organizations, consumer, blogs, and journals. The service is free for everyone.