Beware of online "filters" that hide the information you need

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles", TEDtalksDirector, May 2, 2011: As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

Similarly, you don't want Twitter to replace your RSS reader - always get to the original source. When you see a medical news item on Reuters or WebMD, don't stop there - always go to the original journal article. More often that not you will find that the results reported in the original article are a quite a bit more nuanced and less certain than the layman language, SEO-optimized headline that you first encountered. Always go to the source. If you write a blog, always link to the source.


The circle of online information (full version) (click to enlarge).

Related:

For doctors: How to be a Twitter star in two easy steps

How to Subscribe to "What's New" Specialty Page of UpToDate? No Feed, No Problem for Google Reader

35% of UpToDate topics are updated every four months. The editors select a small number of the most important updates and share them via "What's new" page. These selections are changed with each major release of UpToDate, in March, July and November. See these updates by clicking on the specialty you are interested in.

The page does not provide RSS feed for the different specialties. One solution is to copy/paste the URL address of each subspecialty page you are interested in the Google Reader "Add a subscription" field (top left corner). Google Reader will automatically create a RSS feed from this "feedless" page.



References:
UTD Contents: What's New

Are You Dependent on UpToDate for Your Clinical Practice?
5 Tips to Stay Up-to-Date with Medical Literature
Image source: UpToDate.

How to follow Twitter users in Google Reader

In summary, @dreamingspires asked how you can follow more Twitter users without feeling overwhelmed with updates.

I only follow around 60 people on Twitter who in general do not post very frequently.

However, I follow more Twitter accounts in Google Reader which is actually nicer because I see the tweets grouped by user and I can use tags/folders. TweetDeck has groups but Google Reader is more efficient, it also has better search and saves all tweets. In addition, Google Reader is available from any Internet-connected computer while the current version of TweetDeck is only desktop-based. Seesmic has a web version but Google Reader is more efficient.



A screenshot of some of the medical Twitter feeds I subscribe to in Google Reader.

In short, you can expand the number of people you follow on Twitter by subscribing to their RSS feeds in Google Reader.

Currently, there is no tool that works better with large inflows of information than Google Reader in "condensed" view. Try switching the view modes in Google Reader by pressing the "1" and "2" keys.

@dreamingspires was concerned that interacting was not possible with the RSS feed but in fact it takes only 2 clicks - click on the tweet in Google Reader, which opens the Twitter page, and then click "reply".


The circle of online information (full version) (click to enlarge).

Related:
How to deal with the information overload from blogs, RSS and Twitter

How to make medical RSS aggregators better

The Problems with RSS

For some reason, RSS has not caught up with most physicians. My Google Reader is loaded with 350 RSS feeds that produce about 2,500 items per day, but I understand that this is not for everybody. We are too busy and it turns out that RSS concept is not that easy to grasp. Assembling RSS feeds in a reader takes time and effort.

Make Your Own "Medical Journal" with iGoogle Personalized Page


Make Your Own "Medical Journal" with iGoogle Personalized Page.

Two years ago, I described how you can Make Your Own "Medical Journal" with iGoogle Personalized Page and provided easy links to the feeds of the "Big Five" medical journals.

Since then, several medical RSS aggregators have launched that make the process of utilizing RSS for staying up-to-date much easier and even enjoyable.

PeRSSonalized Medicine by Webicina

PeRSSonalized Medicine by Webicina.com was one of the first services (but not the first) to arrange the medical journal feeds in a visually appealing way and make RSS consumption user-friendly.


PeRSSonalized Medicine by Webicina.com.

Kudos to Berci for achieving a significant user adoption which is not an easy task. Webicina.com also includes a feature which I call "create your own feed from PubMed search." There are no specialty-specific pages yet.

AllTop RSS-powered Magazine Concept

AllTop has condition-specific pages but most of them are geared toward the general public rather than health professionals, for example, see Alltop - Top Asthma News.


Alltop - Top Asthma News.

ClinicalReader for RSS

ClinicalReader WAS a medical RSS aggregator which launched at the end of June 2009. The service had a simple and easy to understand interface which was attractive and showcased the great benefits of using RSS to gather medical information.


ClinicalReader.com.

One of the best features of ClinicalReader was the specialty-specific pages which were very useful.

Updated on 07/14/2009: Apparently, the team of ClinicalReader advertised unverified endorsements on the website and had serious credibility issues with some prominent medical librarian bloggers. The service was discontinued soon after that. If interested in more details, please see the links below:

Clinical Reader: Starry ethics fail. Eagle Dawg Blog.
Malicious or stupid? You decide. Either way it doesn’t reflect well on Clinical Reader. (The) health informaticist.
Clinical Reader: from zero to negative sixty with one bogus threat. Steve Lawson.

Suggestions how to make medical RSS aggregators better

- Make a list of top 30 medical blogs. A top 10 or 15 list is too limiting and leaves many useful blogs out. A top 50 or a top 100 list is a "crowd" and few people will check all of them. Most of the leading blogs would be captured in a top 30 and the list would be manageable. This is really a "beginner reader" list which encourages them to explore further. There should also be lists of specialty-specific blogs (see more below).

- Make a list of top 30 medical Twitters.

- Make a list of the top blogs in each major specialty, for example, cardiology blogs, allergy blogs, etc. Be sure to separate physician/nurses blogs for those authored by patients. These multiple specialty-specific lists should be as inclusive as possible. See an example. Give a chance to everybody to be listed, even the A-bloggers were Z-bloggers when they first started. This way nobody should feel left out. Please include a list of medical librarians too - few people have contributed more to educating physicians about the benefits of Web 2.0 tools.

- Make a list of the top Twitters in each major specialty, for example, cardiology, nephrology, allergy, etc. This is a list of the "Top Twitter Doctors as a spreadsheet-wiki open to anybody to edit:



The suggestions how to make medical RSS aggregators better apply to all major medical journals. Users want a one-stop shop for medical information (see my notes from the NEJM Horizons conference for reference). BMJ already has a social network (doc-2-doc) albeit one that is scarcely populated. It would be easy to add a medical RSS aggregator as part of the social network. Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA should do the same.

It looks like "printed media" is going out of business fast and unless Kindle replaces it, not many people would be willing to visitto 7-10 different journal web pages to get the information the need. All major journals that are likely to survive, especially the ones funded by medical societies, will most likely have social networks or at least a medical RSS aggregator. The networks should be open, allowing easy export/import, and using Twitter/Google/Facebook Connect, etc. to avoid the need to remember more user names/passwords.

References:
Make Your Own "Medical Journal" with iGoogle Personalized Page
Lists of Medical Bloggers and Twitters Categorized by Specialty
NEJM Horizons Conference to Push Boundaries of Traditional Medical Publishing, Day 1