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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.

In a recent post, Jason Calacanis went off on one about Newsgator's 'accidental' and temporary placement of ads against some Weblogs Inc. feeds in the somewhat bizarrely titled - "Newsgator is not stealing our content", in which he states:

Let me be clear to RSS reader companies: You have no right to make money off of our full-feeds. None. Any advertising against our full content is ours and it belongs to our bloggers and shareholders. If you want to make money off our full feeds you need to cut a deal with us--it's called syndication and folks have been doing it for a long time.

Cue flurry of posts from blogosphere, some in favour (Duncan Riley) of JC's stance (there's a Monty Python sketch there somewhere),and some against (TechDirt, RSS Blog) My initial reaction was anti-JC, then I stopped and wondered whether he had a point or not. Then I saw his note on the Newsgator response, which included this line:

Let's face it, web-based RSS readers are--at the end of the day--web pages. As a publisher we can not let folks republish our content in any way they like, and we certainly can't let folks republish our content with advertising against it! If you replace RSS reader with "web page" in this whole discussion it is clear that any company taking another companies IP without permission and putting ads againt it is wrong--no matter how much value they provide to the end users.

Hmm - so the distinction is all about whether the client is web based or not...that seems wrong - as does whether the content is represented as a "web page" or not. For instance what would happen if the rendering was done via a flash applet, or an online flash app. What about something like Amphetadesk - a client-side aggregator that serves up local web pages ? Or pure client side aggregators like FeedDemon. Not to mention ad supported client applications - like Opera. What about an independent application (or a Firefox plugin) that just scans the content of whatever is in the main browser frame and displays relevant ads, or relevant links ? All of these, to me, work on the same principle as Newgator or Bloglines, so why penalise the web application ? We can no longer can make an useful distinction between web and desktop applications in such instances. Doing so seems very arbitrary and out of touch. I think, eventually, JC will be forced to alter his position on this - and I don't think it will do him or the Weblogs content any harm at all. [tags]newsgator, ads, bloglines, aggregator, calacanis, weblogsinc, monetization[/tags]

A quick primer on RSS from Jeremy Phillips. Apparently (yahoo study) - only 4% of internet users subscribe to RSS feeds, and on average 6.6 feeds are subscribed to. Yet, somehow, on average, users take over 4 hours per week reading their feeds. So - slow readers, or are the blogs very very frequently posted to ? Moving into the sales stuff about analysing and monitoring - visualising the market with a Strategic something map - talking again about the importance of presenting information visually. We've moved way way away from RSS here... Leaves us with some RSS tips - didn't think they were particularly great - here are some things I think you should consider:

• Think about how people might reuse the content - have a clear policy on what you will allow and disallow. For some, content reuse and mashups can be of huge value, for others it may be revenue decreasing.
• Consider whether you'll publish full feeds or partial feeds. Full feeds encourage subscription, but can limit visits to your actual blog
• Both Mozilla Firefox and the next version of Internet Explorer will allow users to subscribe to RSS. Having IE be RSS aware will fuel an explosion in the use of RSS feeds, and also make the art of headline writing even more important.
• Advertising in RSS feeds - can be done...but do you want to do it ?

Technorati Tags: blogging4business

I’ve been playing around with some alternatives to Bloglines over the Christmas period. In summary, although many of them offer advanced features, none of them works as well for me as Bloglines does. I made by habitual hopeful return to Newsgator, and tried Rojo out properly for the first time. I also fired up Feeddemon again, as it used to be my feedreader of choice.

In general I’m not a big fan of frames in web pages, but the 2 pane interface of Bloglines suits how I read – allowing me to scroll down all of the feed content, and then moving to the next feed without having to scroll back up. Such a small sounding thing, but it turned out to be the single biggest deciding factor for me.

Newsgator and Rojo have some advanced features – recommended feeds, item rating, item flagging, attempts to show relevant stories, story sharing amongst one’s social network, item level tagging, etc. Didn’t use any of these features in anger – and to be honest I’m not sure I agree with the seemingly monolithic nature of these services – I’d rather use Bloglines, Greasemonkey and del.icio.us to share items of interest, either with other people (eg a social network), or with myself (for later blogging or other use).

I still like Feeddemon – and if I was always in one place using one machine I think I could go back to it – but (and this might make you laugh), I actually feel guilty using it just to read feeds ! So many options to tinker with, Watches and News Bins to set up, styles to play around with – I should be doing more than simply reading stuff shouldn’t I ? Bloglines doesn’t make me feel like I have to do anything more than read (and occasionally post something to del.cio.us) if I want to.

Blogjet has been the posting client I’ve used most over the last year or so, and on the way I’ve tried lots – ecto, w.bloggar, flock, and numerous others that I’ve forgotten about.

I’ve been trying out performancing over the last week or so, and while it has some good points (being integrated into Firefox is good, although Blogjet is only a right-click away), but the formatting seems totally hit and miss, I can’t seem to find a way of adding technorati tags without them appearing twice, and the current lack of trackbacks is a show-stopper. So – one to watch, but not a replacement for Blogjet yet.

Technorati tags: aggregator, posting, newsgator, bloglines, rojo, blogjet, performancing, 

Interesting - it seems as if Michael Rudnick, Watson Wyatt's Global Intranet and Portal Practice Leader, has started a blog - Employee Portals 2.0. Toe in the water time - it's a blogger blog, hosted on blogspot, and not referring to WW, but the fact that he's taken the first step further demonstrates blogging's penetration into the world of professional service firms. I expect this trend to accelerate rapidly in 2006. His first substantive entry describes some basic and fairly well known internal uses for RSS, such as delivering HR communication. While this distribution of generic information is, of course, of value, I'm starting to think that there are many interesting uses beyond this, particularly when RSS and personalisation start being mashed up. I touched on this use back in January - RSS and aggregators protect against phishing, but the internal use cases are just as interesting. Providing a personalised RSS feed from, for example, a total rewards site (or HR site) would provide quick and efficient delivery of vital info, without requiring an employee to visit the site. Stock plan value updates, pension plan updates, back end administrator query resolutions/updates, targeted communications, etc. Of course, getting an employee to subscribe in the first place will be a challenge, but if we imagine a reasonably well developed internal RSS consumption infrastructure, then injecting these feeds into an employee's personal aggregator should be possible. The other thing that sprung to mind was that identity confirmation is going to become even more important, both for ensuring that people get only the feeds they are entitled to, but also to ensure that people who start blogs are who they say they are. This doesn't mean that I think it isn't Michael Rudnick blogging, but it did occur to me that it would be easy to set up a blog in someone else's name, and do some damage to their reputation. And with that thought - have a great Christmas - I'm in Quebec looking forward to getting some decent snowboarding done, and looking at the mounds of snow outside, I think I've a good chance ! Technorati Tags: internal, RSS

Following on from my previous post, Greg Reinacker of Newsgator fame, has posted his thoughts on how to secure RSS feeds.

His conclusion, RSS is transported over HTTP, and mechanisms for authentication, authorisation and encryption already exist for HTTP – so why not use them.