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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.

I'm in San Antonio for the next few days, attending the IABC Leadership Institute Conference, thanks to the IABC UK. As the new IABC UK webmaster I'm mainly here to meet with the IABC web team and discuss some exciting work they've been carrying out to provide some templates to chapter sites to create up to date websites based on Wordpress. Looking forward to seeing what they've done, and also to revamping the existing IABC UK site.

I've also been roped in (obligatory cattle and cowboys reference, seeing that I'm Texas) to a panel this afternoon organised by the San Antonio chapter, talking about International Communications Trends. Needless to say, I'm going to spend my bits talking about social media!

Looking forward to an interesting few days, as well as seeing a bit of San Antonio, a town I visited for the first and only time 20 years ago.

I started this post over a year and a half ago, and it's languished as a draft in 3 different pieces of software (LiveWriter, WordPress and Movable Type), but today feels like a very good day to dust off the cobwebs and unleash it onto the world. (Although, actually, I only got one line into it before saving it as a draft...). Anyway, without further ado, the post - such as it was !

JP Ragaswami points to Tara Hunt talking about aggregating her bits and pieces strewn over the web.

So - why post now ? Well - in the last year and a half, many personal aggregation / lifestreaming services have sprung up, but today (and the reason I've finally gotten round to doing something with this post), SixApart released Action Streams - a quite excellent personal aggregation plugin for Movable Type 4. Byrne Reese also blogged about it over on majordojo.

Installing the plugin adds a simple interface for adding your activity from other sites, with prebuilt support for the most popular. It's a relatively straightforward process, although the template changes might put off people with no experience of MT, but 10 minutes of template changes was all it took for me to get my lifestream on this site - check it out here. You do need to be able to run a scheduled task to get it to update - but that shouldn't be an issue for any decent host.

Pretty simple, and plays nicely with the Universal Template Set. There's some good stuff coming out of  SixApart right now, and it feels like MT is on a bit of a roll.

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Samuel Johnson, London resident, September 20, 1777

"Get me out of here"

Anu Gupta, London resident, September 20, 2007

It's no secret that over the years that I've lived in London, I've enjoyed it less and less. The sub-current of irritation that constantly and insistently accompanies almost any public interaction resonates through me and starts to feel like tinnitus of the soul. So, time to change, time to get out. The plan, or should that be The Plan, is to move. Far away to Montreal where seasons are seasons, cost of living is low, and everyone walks around with an adorable French accent. Well, everyone except me. My language skills are virtually non-existent, a failing that I acknowledged around the time of 'le singe est dans l'arbre'. I don't speak French, despite the constant prodding of my French speaking girlfriend. I can get away with it here, but over there it'll be harder. So, rather than waste more money on a French tutor (because that was 6 weeks of Wednesday evening back-to-school torture), and various flavours of Learn French CD (I won't even start on how bad they were), I've been digging around to see if there's any help available online. And of course there is - but two recently announced sites look like they might be pretty cool, and one of them had me almost slapping my head (I had to stop myself) as an obvious solution that no one had thought about before (not to my knowledge anyway). So - first up is Mango, billed as "the first Free enterprise language learning course available on the Internet.". What you get is a Flash application delivering learning in a slide show format. Different situations are covered (at the post office, at customs - I didn't check whether at the Apple Store was included). Pretty conventional, but free. Much more interesting is LiveMocha, which adds a Web 2.0 social something to the mix, and not only provides the basics of language tuition, but also provides a community of like minded people to practice with. So, sign up, say what languages you speak, and which you're learning, and you can match up with people doing the opposite, so that you both get something out of it. You can friend people, and there are scoreboards to encourage you to keep on going, and probably some more stuff that I haven't seen yet. Initial impressions are good - the site looks clean and well designed, and this is a great idea. Let's see if it can take a language dunce like me and get him conversing en francais. A bientôt. [tags]web2.0, web20, language, learning[/tags]

SixApart have announced that Chris Alden is the new Chairman and CEO. Mena Trott makes a rare posting on her corporate blog about the move, and Chris also posts about the change on his blog. I met Chris at the beginning of the year, while I was at Headshift, and was impressed - and I think having someone who has developed and innovated in the blogging space can only be good for SixApart. GigaOm and TechCrunch also have the announcement, and you can follow any reaction on Techmeme. [tags]SixApart, Movable Type, MovableType[/tags]

Jeffrey Walker, the President of Atlassian Software, wonders if Razorfish should have started with MediaWiki as the base for their new enterprise wiki.

It strikes me that if Razorfish invested all this effort and money, then the question needs to be asked: Is Mediawiki an enterprise wiki? Certainly not out of the box. One full-time intern and two part-time developers is at least $50-100K for one year! Probably the latter number. Mediawiki in this instance became an enterprise wiki but only after considerable work.

Shiv Singh, Razorfish's Enterprise Solutions lead, responds:

... Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffery implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

I commented on his blog, but thought I'd post here as well:

Shiv - not sure I agree with you... I think you're lucky (or unlucky) in having bench resource available - a lot of companies aren't in that situation and have a constant battle to get developer time. So, faced with that situation - what is the cost of having 2 developers available, part time, to develop and look after your mediawiki instance over 18 months ? Secondly, would spending the relatively small amount on an unlimited license for Confluence ($8,000) or Socialtext, and getting out of the box AD integration, search and granular permissioning, represent better value than developing it from scratch ? Also, developing inhouse commits you to a codebase that with an audience of just yourselves (until you release it out to the community ?).

I should disclose that the company I work for - Headshift - does a lot of work with Confluence. [tags]confluence, atlassian, wiki, mediawiki, socialsoftware, enterprise, enterprise2.0 [/tags]