Category: Physiotherapy and Web 2.0

Yesterday, I was asked whether it is possible to be alerted when I post a new entry to our blog without physically going to our URL – http://migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca/physio. The answer is YES, certainly.

In order to be alerted you would need to use RSS feeds. What is RSS you might ask at this point?

Here is my insight on RSS feeds and its use (for more information of RSS use in health sciences take a look on my recent article published in JCHLA)

RSS – (RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) – is an easy-to-use XML format for distributing content on the web. It has been around since the late 1990s, but has received considerable attention very recently due to the expansion of blogging.

In short, RSS is a simple XML syntax for describing recent additions of content to a website. These additions might include news items, blog updates, or any other information elements. Users subscribe to the feeds using an RSS aggregator or newsreader that crawls the sites on a regular basis, usually several times an hour. An aggregator displays feeds and enables users to organize them and to access related web pages when these are available.

RSS feeds might have the following applications for you:

1. Blog updates – RSS feeds mean that blog readers might be informed immediately when a blog is updated. Most blog software (including ours) include embedded RSS feed generation.

2. Newspapers and journals articles. Increasingly, many newspapers and scientific journals provide new content via RSS feeds. My daily favorites are New York Times Health section feed, International Herald Tribune Health and Science RSS and CBC Health and Science News

3. Press releases and announcements – RSS can be very useful for more formal announcements. For instance U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provides seven (7) RSS feeds including the agency’s press releases, recent recalls, withdrawals and institutional alerts – http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/rss.html

4. News and Database updates. Some major services such as Google News and PubMed have recently started to enable providing search results in RSS format. RSS is likely to become increasingly common for users to stay current in the future, particularly with respect to keeping up with new research.

There are a number of RSS aggregators available. However, these might be easily categorized as follows:
• Web-based readers – These websites collect RSS feeds online and might be accessed from any Internet-enabled computer. Bloglines is my favorite free online RSS reader, allowing an easy access to selected RSS feeds from both my home and work desktops.

• Standalone clients – These software packages access selected RSS feeds and download results to your computer. SharpReader is my favorite free standalone RSS reader.

• Plugins – These programs are integrated into software packages installed on your desktop, such as Microsoft Outlook.

For an easy introduction to RSS feeds, I recommend a simple web-based aggregator such as Bloglines. Being web-based, there is no software to download and subscribed feeds can be accessed from any Internet-connected machine.

To subscribe to our RSS feed for UBC Physio Info-Blog, please do the following:
1. Find the orange RSS/XML button on our blog or alternatively use Subscribe to this blog’s feed link on the right-hand menu.
2. Copy the URL
3. Go to you favorite RSS reader and add our URL to your feeds
4. At this stage your reader will automatically download any new posts we blog here

Enjoy 🙂

Exciting news! Today, I have completed the preliminary version of physiotherapy search engine. I called it PhysioEngine…Any other ideas for the name?

What does this search engine do? Well, I designed this tool to search only for high-quality physiotherapy content on the Web. Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? So, here is the tool to do just that!

How does it work? Using Rollyo, which in turns is using Yahoo! Indexing system, we are limiting our Web searches to only 25 selected domains (e.g. ubc.ca or .edu). So far, I included the following web domains in my search:

1. 129.78.28.173 – PEDro database – not working yet, I am working with PEDro to resolve this problem
2. www.ptjournal.org
3. www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus – MEDLINE Plus
4. www.canadian-health-network.ca – Canadian Health Network – federal government
5. www.csp.org.uk – U.K. The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy
6. www.hc-sc.gc.ca – Health Canada
7. http://apa.advsol.com.au – Australian Physiotherapy Association
8. www.physiotherapy.ca – Canadian Physiotherapy Association
9. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez – PubMed
10. www.opa.on.ca – Ontario Physiotherapy Association
11. www.physiosa.org.za – South African Society of Physiotherapy
12. www.rehab.queensu.ca – School of Rehabilitation Therapy, Queen’s University
13. www.omni.ac.uk/subject-listing/WB460.html – U.K. OMNI gateway
14. www.bcphysio.org – PABC
15. www.cirrie.buffalo.edu – Center for International Rehabilitation Research Information and Exchange – University of Buffalo
16. www.phac-aspc.gc.ca – Public Health Agency of Canada
17. www.ubc.ca – UBC
18. www.utoronto.ca – UofT

All of them are high quality websites or web portals with reliable physiotherapy information, in addition all of these are FREE, which also was one of my criterions.

How to use this search engine? You can either search this resource from this blog by:
1. Typing your query into the red search box on the top-right corner of the blog
2. Click on the drop-down menu which says “Select” and choose “PhysioEngine”
3. Click on “Go” to view your high-quality tailored results

Alternatively, you can just go to this URL – http://rollyo.com/tuta1/physioengine/ and run your search from there. The results would be the same!

Let’s try “knee replacement” as an example. Running this query in our own engine will result MedlinePlus webpage on knee replacement and Current Bibliographies in Medicine on this topic by the U.S. National Library of Medicine to be the first few hits! Exciting stuff. Compare it to the general Yahoo search for “knee replacement” – http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=knee+replacement , where the first half of the screen are just sponsored links and then some .com sites.

In any case, please give it a try and see how it works for you! Share your thoughts in the comments for this post. I am looking forward to hearing from you 🙂