RSS and business -- what really matters

As I've noted before, I had been swimming in the seas of RSS for a while as a producer of RSS content at media companies, but it wasn't until recently that I had my awakening as a consumer of RSS.  In a classic case of (possibly) bad timing, my personal RSS awakening converged with the recent Echo discussions.   Whether or not anything will change is to be determined, but my discussions with non-developers who use RSS indicate that they are pretty bored by the whole discussion and just don't want the rug pulled out from under them -- Technology Marketing writer Jonathan Angel represents this contingent well when he writes "Stop wanking and drive."  In any case, I'm reminded of an excerpt from Ellen Ullman's book Close to the Machine, a book which offers the best glimpse into the mindset of programming that I've ever read:

When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run the program. Show them: Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs. Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words and what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational system. Talk all you want, but this thing here: it works.
(this quote is actually on page 2 of the Salon excerpt)

Of course there are valid reasons to have this discussion and valid reasons to correct some past mistakes, but my sense in reading some of the hoopla is we're simply experiencing some classic developer behavior.  In my experience managing developers and being a developer, developers are always enamored of the new system they are working on -- especially if it's one they've conceived.  The old system replacing the new system always sucks -- especially if another developer built it.  End users like Jonathan Angel end up sitting on the sidelines wondering what the fuss is about.  Sometimes the results of these overhauls are excellent, but just as often, the users feel like they didn't really get anything noticeably better after all the noise dies down.  We'll see what happens here.

The developer discussions aside, e-mail from my last column about RSS elicited some interested feedback from the business side of things, which is what really matters if RSS or RSS-like technologies are going to be ultimately successful.  Greg Reinacker pointed me to an RSS case study for his NewsGator product (full disclosure:  Greg advertises his product in InfoWorld's RSS feeds as I've discussed here).  While the case study obviously focuses on how Greg's product was leveraged in a business setting, the real story is how RSS met a defined business need, and met it well.  Yes, I know case studies are marketing tools, but I include NewsGator's marketing material here because it illustrates a coming-of-age of the RSS concept, i.e. material you can show non-technical people to help them "get it."  Also, everything in this case study rings true based on my experience with RSS. (a Google search for "RSS" and "case study" actually gives you the NewsGator case study as the first useful link -- if you know of any more RSS case studies, let me know):

Triple Point started with a simple goal: "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information ‘hunt and peck’ that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work," says Allie [Rogers, CIO of Triple Point Technology].

I also heard from Phil Gomes, the co-founder of PR agency G2B Group, which has a blog of its own and a whitepaper on RSS and corporate communications.  Jon Udell has already covered Phil's whitepaper well, but suffice it to say that it's refreshing to see that some people in the PR world are thinking about this and getting it.  I subscribed to the G2B RSS feed so I can stay up-to-speed with where they are headed in their thinking.  The great thing about weblogs/RSS is that I can afford time-wise to peek into the thinking of this world on a regular basis -- I'm subscribed to 31 different sources currently and have yet to feel overburdened by the amount of incoming information.

As a final note on business and RSS, Paul Beard references my previous post about RSS awareness at Gartner, Forrester, and Giga, pointing out that if I search for RDF on those sites, I would do a little better.  Thanks, Paul.  I'll let Mr. Safe know, but I have a feeling he's getting pretty tired of talking about this and is thinking about other things.