Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Taking RSS for granted

October 29, 2003 | Comments: (0)

Taking RSS for granted

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Once you start taking a certain technology for granted, it's a fairly safe bet that that it's reached a level of functional stability. This is certainly true of my experience with RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication - here's our FAQ). To use an Apple-ism, it just works.

But at the same time, I've been reminded that RSS is still not as widely used as other messaging technologies like email and IM. Yesterday I caught up with a friend - and "former enemy" as he so kindly put it - former eWeek labs guy John Taschek. John's crossed over to the vendor side and joined hosted CRM outfit Salesforce.com.

John noted that Salesforce is a voracious consumer of online news. Sure, they read all the mainstream pubs, but they also study a raft of technology and CRM industry publications.

The traditional method most companies use to monitor media coverage is through a combination of expensive press clipping services and masses of corporate-wide email messages. Salesforce is no exception, although John and many staffers there also consume RSS feeds.

The trouble with clipping services is they are a costly, somewhat ad-hoc and difficult process to manage - how accessible are the archives for example?

Of course, RSS-powered news aggregators are a great alternative, allowing you to subscribe to free news feeds or blogs of your choice. Then if you want to post links, manage and distribute a particular article, all it takes is a password protected blog that's made available to staff and partners.

And in many cases you can get news aggregators and blog software all rolled into one - Radio being the obvious example.

The solution to the news overload problem is right under our noses. I agreed with John that it's surprising more companies are not consuming RSS at a corporate level. But like so many new technologies, mainstream acceptance is often achieved long after it's expected by the prognsticating technorati.

Posted by Mark Jones on October 29, 2003 01:31 PM

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