Global Health News Feeds, Part Two

Global health news tends to fall between the cracks of "world news" (wars, disasters) and "consumer health news" (asthma, heart attacks). Last week, I posted instructions on how to build your own global health news feed using Yahoo Pipes. Here's another option that's a little more hands-on.

In this case, I'm using Google Reader, a news feed aggregator and its "shared item feature" to combine news items generated by RSS feeds from the traditional media with alerts and other posts that I find particularly newsworthy as I surf the Internet.

The advantage: many of these newsy bits of information--like a recent BioMed Central research paper linking diabetes and tuberculosis in India--are typically not covered by the mainstream media.

I capture the surfed items using del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website. And then I subscribe to an RSS feed of my del.icio.us bookmarks with Google Reader.

The big advantage of del.icio.us is, of course, that you can see what others have posted as their favorite items on subjects like tuberculosis, malaria, poverty etc. Many pairs of eyes are sometimes better than one.

A further refinement, I hit the "shared button" on Google Reader only for those del.icio.us items that I think might be interesting to more people than just myself.

So if you want a news feed that combines automatically generated items with some that have been tagged by human hands, then check out my shared global health news items in the Global Health mini-blog on this page at right.

If you want to see more than five items at a time, go directly to a separate web page with my shared global health news items. There's also news feed.

If you get inspired to create your own global health news feed, let me know!