Marshal Kirkpatrick over at RWW proclaims that Enterprise RSS has died. Taking a closer look at the post reveals some basic misunderstandings of RSS and how it's being used by organisations.

First up, what he is really talking about is that RSS reader uptake within the enterprise is very low. If we narrowly define RSS reader as a separate single function application (whether desktop or browser based), then I'd probably accept that - installing new software is hard within a lot of orgs (for various reasons), and who really, apart from hard core information fetishists, needs yet another hosepipe of information ?

However, it's a long leap to equate the lack of uptake of RSS readers (as narrowly defined above) with the death of Enterprise RSS, because the two are *not* necessarily correlated.

When I had my all too brief stint at Headshift, we (and I'm going to say we, because I think I was in the room when this was being discussed - and was definitely in the building somewhere), worked out that within an organsation, RSS was the transport layer for information, upon which all sorts of amazing social, collaborative, filtered applications could be envisaged.

And that still remains the case - from what I see, increasingly, RSS is being offered as a data transfer protocol, or a wire protocol, allowing information to be taken from one source, mashed up, munged or left alone, and reused and redisplayed somwhere else - a dashboard, a custom built application that has information display as one of its features. In many cases, no one using the system is even aware that RSS is being used , or what it is. And that's fine - they don't need to.

And there's more. I'm doing some work for a PCT - a part of the NHS responsible for delivering services to local people In conversations with partner organisations, the following phrases occur often and naturally:

"We'll supply an RSS feed of news items, you can take that and use it if you want"

"Can you give us an RSS feed of your events so we can add it to our health section"

So, RSS is being used as a transport layer between organisations, allowing simple pubish and subscribe mechanisms to move information around with little additional effort. I'd call that a very significant use of RSS in the enterprise.

So - is RSS dead ? Hell no - it just stopped being an overt feature and became part of the plumbing instead.

Thought this was very interesting. Shel Holtz being interviewed by Ron Shewchuk

Question #2: Which company do you think does internal communications best, and why?

Shel: I'm reluctant to pick "the best," because there are a lot of companies whose internal communication programs I haven't seen. That said, I've always been impressed with the communications at Best Buy. It's open and candid. It promotes business literacy. It uses multiple channels. And they're always open to new ideas. Not too long ago, for instance, they introduced the Blue Shirt Nation, a social network for retail workers accessible over the World Wide Web. It has become a force of nature. Twenty percent of retail workers have created profiles. Turnover in the retail workforce is about 75%, but among those with BSN profiles, it has dropped to 8%. These are engaged employees with a solid network of colleagues they would have to abandon if they left.#

via For your Approval

That sounds pretty conclusive, but it's possible that it's only the employees that are engaged and motivated anyway who are joining Blue Shirt Nation. It would be great to identify a control group that share similar engaged characteristics to see what the difference in turnover is.

Thinking about this some more (what - you expect me to think *before* I post ??), maybe it doesn't matter. We *know* that engaged employees are less likely to leave, and if we can provide more places for them to communicate and network, thus deepening and broadening their engagement with the organisation, and, more importantly, their peers, then we're doing a good thing - regardless of whether the place is virtual or real.

Time to dust the cobwebs off my blog and get it going again.

The iPhone plugin for MT is pretty sweet - using it now for this post.

Having spent a fair amount of time consulting on intranets and internal applications, as well as being on the receiving end as a user, one thing that's *almost* invariably true is the following...

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/

I was looking around for some alternatives to Basecamp, and was pretty surprised to see that there are a ton of alternatives out there. So naturally a list is the way forward.

No recommendations yet, and not all of these are Basecamp replacments - Harvest and ClockingIt, for example, could be seen as complimentary.

• Goplan
• Unfuddle
• OnStage
• Harvest (time tracking and invoicing)
• TeamWorkLive
• ActionThis
• 5pm
• DeskAway
• Collabtrak
• ActiveCollab (self hosted)
• ProjectPier (fork of older version of ActiveCollab, selfhosted, opensource)
• ClockingIt (timetracking, opensource)
• Lighthouse
• Copper
• Wrike
• Intervals
• Central Desktop
• Huddle

Technorati Tags: basecamp, projectmanagement

Despite the waves of jetlag that ocassionally threaten to leave me faceplanted on a table, I'm having fun here in San Antonio.

As is the case in all conferences, the true value is always in the people you meet,rather than the conference itself, and I've been having a blast hanging out with some irreverently like-minded people from down-under - Adrian Copley (Copley Communications), Anna Kominik (Ideas Shop) and Amanda Boland Curran (Acid), - who are a lot of fun, as well as being smart and experienced comms professionals. What's especially pleasing is that they're switched on to the way that social media is changing and cascading through the communications sector - and not in a lemming-like follow the herd way, but with an appreciation of how social tools can benefit an organisation if handled properly.

A few margaritas have been drunk, and lots of interesting conversations have been had. Their english isn't bad, and I've been pleased that we've been able to communicate pretty well, only occasionally needing to resort to sign language to get the message across ;-)