When I first got into my latest venture, one of the first things I did was scour the web for anything health care related with a feed attached to it. I found a few heavy medical weblogs, the occasional disgruntled nurse, and I do believe there was a hospital janitor lamenting the effects various human fluids had on his tile surface. Yeah, there wasn’t a whole lot going on there, even considering the janitor’s delicate prose.

The situation has changed in a big way over the past year. I'm seeing new health business blogs pop up weekly – and they're good. One of the more popular sites has, in fact, created a derivative of The Cluetrain Manifesto imaginatively titled “The HealthTrain Manifesto”, and they have an RSS 2.0 feed that is damn near valid.

A couple of months ago I decided we really ought to have a corporate Venus. Not for internal blogs—we don’t believe in those—but to use as a kind of shared news reader. “It will help get the team engaged in the conversation of the market,” I said, “and besides, all the cool kids are doing it.”

I have to hand it to the Planet guys, and especially Sam: we had a health news river flowing within an hour. That might not sound like a big deal but consider that none of these feeds are valid (or even approaching valid) and you soon realize that it is actually quite magical.

The site worked so well internally that we decided to make it publicly available as The Health Benefit News River. We'll see how that goes.

To be honest, I'm a bit worried about what the reaction will be. If anyone has experience running these sites, especially in areas outside of technology, maybe you could help me out with a couple of questions:

  1. Full content – I have a bad feeling that some may not like the idea of having their content republished in full, even if it’s temporarily. Experiences?

  2. We'd like to ensure we're able to syndicate content licensed under any of the non-commercial variants from Creative Commons or other compatible licenses. The site is loosely affiliated with the company (as in, the company pays the hosting bills) but we receive no revenues from the service, nor do we plan to in the future. Are we in the clear here? If not, what would need to change?

  3. Why do people do stuff like wrap every post in a <font size="7"> tag? Does seeing that get easier with time?

I'll try to have a progress update in a month or so. We'll put some numbers together on various feed characteristics, license use, and other items of interest.

This entry has been tagged syndication, business, healthcare, blogging, venus — follow a tag for an archive of related essays, weblog entries, and bookmarks.

Discuss

  1. Ever thought about writing a simple filter to zap the font tags?

    — Sam Ruby on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 08:54 AM #

  2. (1) Some won’t be happy (esp. if they have advertising on their own site), but most don’t care.

    (2) ‘commercial’ is a matter of interpretation; most sane people are going to be fine with it as long as you don’t advertise directly on the planet. Some crazy people are going to be unhappy no matter what; just take down their content if they complain. You might take steps to frame the question beforehand- put text on the page to the effect of ‘provided as a public information service by…’, etc., and providing an email address people can complain to if they are bothered by the inclusion of their feeds.

    (3) people suck.

    John Palfrey has some discussion of this

    — luis on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 08:57 AM #

  3. Oh, cool! I just noticed “What’s hot”. I haven’t included mememe.py in the Venus distribution yet because it doesn’t feel quite ready, but it is getting there.

    — Sam Ruby on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 10:03 AM #

  4. Luis: thanks for the feedback. That’s exactly what I was hoping someone would weight in with.

    Sam: Oh yes. We will be digging into filters very soon now! You have a new contributor. As soon as I take a moment to get comfortable with bzr, I'll shoot over some patches for your review (with tests of course :) I may need some help with bzr: my goal is to get a patch to you without running diff.

    Also, I've been meaning to tell you that I fixed a small problem with Mememe I've experienced on both planet.intertwingly.net and healthnewsriver.com. The memes would sometimes not load (the area remained blank). After looking into it a bit, it seems that it’s possible for the XmlHttpRequest to actually come back before the page is fully loaded. If the area that the Memes are inserted has not been loaded, the insertion fails (and silently).

    The fix was trivial: I moved the memes processing code into a function (grabMemes) that is called from personalize, which is invoked only after DOMContentLoaded. You can take a look here:

    http://healthnewsriver.com/personalize.js

    Lastly, I'm in violent disagreement with your decision to move mememe under the subscription list on Planet Intertwingly. What’s with that?

    — Ryan Tomayko on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 03:23 PM #

  5. Let me start at the bottom: there was no decision to move the meme list under the subscription list. When I view it using Firefox 2.0, it generally appears above the subscription list, which is where I prefer it. Often it shows up immediately, without any repainting, but sometimes you do see a flicker. And yes, due to timing problems, it sometimes appears below the subscription list, and sometimes doesn’t show up at all.

    In short, it is a hack. You've made it more predictable, but that means that there is a predictable and consistent redrawing of this area each time you visit the page.

    The right fix is to rip out the JSON, rip out the AJAX, and simply build the XHTML fragment straight away and directly insert it into the static content at generation time. That’s been on my todo list for quite some time, but has never quite bubbled to the top.

    — Sam Ruby on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 08:14 PM #

  6. Three other things, Ryan: (1) From a reader’s perspective, it is preferable to only include full-text feeds, and not make the reader click all over to get the full force of the information. Relatedly, you'd be surprised how many people who don’t provide full-text feeds are perfectly happy to provide them once you explain what you're using it for. (2) If you're worried about people not liking your full-content republication, you can always ask them- again, most people are actually excited to be republished, in my experience, and it provides a nice excuse to talk to people in the field. (3) I tend to find planets which somehow identify the posters visually more readable- it helps build my identity of those authors as discrete individuals. Obviously hackergotchis might not be appropriate in your semi-corporate context, but a favico or something like that might still be appropriate and help break up the monotony of tons of text.

    Clearly someone needs to write a planet-best-practices.txt ;)

    — Luis on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 10:17 AM #

  7. Luis said:

    … most people are actually excited to be republished, in my experience, and it provides a nice excuse to talk to people in the field.

    I'm finding that out now. I've already had few conversations and requests for addition; everyone has been very nice and helpful.

    I tend to find planets which somehow identify the posters visually more readable- it helps build my identity of those authors as discrete individuals.

    I plan on adding some kind of visual cue. A lot of the sites I'm syndicating have a logo and I've found a few head shots. I think this adds a lot as well.

    Clearly someone needs to write a planet-best-practices.txt ;)

    Yep. A FAQ covering the non-technical issues (licensing, full vs. partial content, etc.) would be especially useful.

    — Ryan Tomayko on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 11:08 AM #

  8. you read healthcare it guy and healthnex? both are good

    — James Governor on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 01:46 PM #

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