I’ve spent the past few minutes overcoming some minor technical challenges I’ve faced incorporating the Atom feed from my shared items in Google Reader into this blog. A tip of the hat is deserved to to the Sowing Light blog for guidance on how to use FeedBurner to create an RSS 2.0 feed for use with the WordPress.com RSS widget. This ability, along with incorporating my Twitter feed and De.licio.us bookmarks is more proof in the power of RSS and the ability to unbundle content from specific web destinations. Even among the early adopters I observe that we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of the potential for RSS.
I’ve written extensively about the potential for RSS to improve competitive intelligence tracking on on-going updates on topics of interest (competitors, technologies, news, customers, regulation, etc.). What I’m barely getting my mind around is the power of RSS for distribution of regularly updated content in both federated and aggregated platforms. The immediate benefit for the information provider is simplification of content management– I don’t need to update a calendar on my web site of a new event of interest if there is an RSS feed of those events already made available by the organization or organizations of import. For the customer, this saves them the need to “check back” for new information on multiple sources.
All of this seems self-evident, and really in some ways it should be. It does still surprise me how many web sites do not make content available in structured forms such as RSS or XML. Likewise I hear from many enterprises with content management challenges that either they don’t know what RSS is or don’t see the value. While it may be self-evident to early adopters, RSS still has a long way to go to reach it’s potential.
