The medical weblogs aggregator is getting more use these days … we're getting closer to an RSS feeed (of rss feeds) so if you want to use your aggregator to read the medical weblogs aggregator .. you can.
The other experimental addition is the addition of comments. Blogborygmi posted the other day on the expanding use of medlogs.com, and lamented:
One concern with medlogs.com is that it'll stifle reader comments — ya can't see 'em from their site, and you're less likely to visit a blog if you've just read the latest post on an aggregator. (Something's gotta explain the dearth of opinions lately). And it seems kind of arbitrary which blogs are indexed in toto, and which get the blurb treatment.
a) Well .. I agree that comments can be useful and interesting, but they're not part of the RSS feed that weblogs publish .. so there would be no way for us to show the comments or add a method of building the dialogue. The next-best thing would be to host the comments ourselves and build a threaded discussion. Dave wants to do this .. so then medlogs would become the slashdot of medical geeks (we'll call it DaveDot). Short of DaveDot .. we've turned on Haloscan comments. IN the title bar of every post, you can post a comment about that post in medlogs. This may provide a method of maintaining comments – without the need for every weblog to host comments. As you can see .. I've disabled comments on Docnotes due to too much commentspam. We'll see how this works. Please let us know what you think.
b) Regarding the arbitrary nature of the how much of the weblog appears in Medlogs .. it's all about the RSS. Some RSS or Atom feeds provide all of the post – so we provide that to you on medlogs. Other feeds have only an excerpt .. so that's what you get. So it's not arbitrary at all … and in fact, I'm not sure which one I like better. We would certainly be able to cut off part of the feeds (so all feeds show only an excerpt) and sometimes I think that this would be better (especially for the graphics-intensive feeds) .. but if we had only an excerpt, we'd have to be clicking on the URL for the post every time .. which defeats the "get it all here" concept of the aggregator.
