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AOA News starts website

on February 10th, 2005 | Filed under Optoblog

AOA News website was recently launched. I finally took the time to login to see what it’s like. It has a blog format, but the disappointing thing is that they haven’t syndicated it with RSS or Atom. They also don’t allow you to see the full article unless you log in with your member number and password.
I really think they’re missing the boat on this. AOA News has the captive audience and the industry relationships to make a “bleeding edge” blog. If they could implement an RSS feed, I could have up to the minute optometric info, without having to surf a website. Robert Scoble, a prolific blogger, delivered a keynote address on the concept of web logs. Before, RSS he would have to visit each individual site to read the updates. With multiple sources of news, one cannot use a web browser to click through every site offering newsworthy content. It just takes too long.
RSS feed aggregators (like newsgator.com or bloglines.com) do the work for you by downloading the syndicated content at leisure and highlight the new posts. Scoble and other bloggers have over 1000 feeds that they keep track of.
Of course, in the optometric world, there are fewer sources of industry news than in the tech world. Still, optometry needs to think to the future which technology. We as a profession have historically been slow to adopt new technology. For the good of the profession, we must become more trend forward.
A visit to any optometric conference exhibit hall shows us that the future of our profession is integrated with technology. The time has come for our profession to start on the band wagon of information sharing through blogging and syndication (RSS/Atom). We need more optometrist blogs and more industry blogs. All optometric product companies should keep us current with feeds and blogs. If a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed, it’s just another website-not a true blog. AOA News should be the example to optometry by offering syndication for at least the non-login content. (Even the Official AAOphthal blog has an RSS feed.)

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