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Coping with Info Overload using your Palm & RSS

Wired News: Aggregators Attack Info Overload is an interesting article which highlights the increasing popularity of “News Aggregators”. I don’t know about you, but I suffer from the “Not Enough Time” syndrome and anything which can save me from having to say, surf for information is most welcome. Lots of medical information is now available from Newsfeeds. These come in XML or RSS (rich site summary) format. You need to have a News Aggregator to be able to “pull” in the feeds of your choice. But having set the Aggregator, you no longer have to surf over to the sites for the articles you one. You can peruse the topic headings and selectively click on the links of your choice.

Now what about the Palm? There’s no news aggregator for Palm OS AFAIK. This is my solution:

1) I use Amphetadesk – which is a Web based News aggregator. It’s easy to setup and available on multiple platforms – Windows, Mac and Linux.

2) Having setup the Newsfeeds and getting Amphetadesk to work properly, you get to view all your “news channels” in a single web page (in my case it is http://127.0.0.1:8888/index.html – don’t bother clicking on this link – it opens only on your local machine)

3) I set iSiloX to convert http://127.0.0.1:8888/index.html to an iSilo document (0 link depth). The conversion is perfect and I can take my updated Amphetadesk aggregated News with me to browse offline.

Where to get Newsfeeds? A good place to start is Syndic8 where you can find Medical newsfeeds in XML/RSS format from sites like Moreover, Medscape and others. Sometimes, the description may be too brief and the drawback of this system is that clicking on the “link” in iSilo does not take you to the external web page obviously, but you can Copy & Paste the URL into a Webbrowser (I use WebBrowserPro on my T|T) if you happen to have Internet access (I use Bluetooth to connect with a Bluetooth enabled PC with ADSL access at work but you could do this say over GPRS or WiFi)