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February 18, 2004
RSS business
In the same vein as the previous post, Jeffrey Nolan blogs a VCs views from Demo. Well worth a read and a comment.
- I was surprised to hear very little in the way of new applications being enabled within the enterprise via blogs and RSS. How about product development collaboration, portals, event monitoring?
I've been writing about RSS inside the enterprise and for business data use for a while now. I too find it surprising that we haven't seen more RSS enabled products or new developments appear by now but hold on...
...Most of the enterprises I deal with in my day job still haven't really "gotten" the weblog. Now this I find really surprising. How many commercial sites do you visit that have a weblog? How many of those companies probably have weblogs on the inside? Even though RSS isn't just about weblogs, it's sure using them to piggyback its popularity.
So we need to take a step back from our self-indulgent "weblogs are everywhere" thinking - because they're not. We need to work out what we can do to change this - better weblog prodcts, more integration with enterprise applications, enterprise weblog consulting etc. Once weblogs are more commonplace inside corporations, then RSS will follow.
Posted by Matthew at February 18, 2004 02:59 PM
Comments
One of the main factors slowing things down is the lack of RSS clients in the enterprise. It's a chicken and egg situation. Because people haven't grokked the weblog, they don't have an RSS client. And because they don't have an RSS client, they're not going to 'connect' with RSS.
When I demo'd my RSS transport tracking development at work (article about it available on SDN, and mentioned here: http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro/2004/01/09#hello2004), the first thing I had to do was find, explain, and install an RSS client on people's desktops. It's still uphill in the enterprise.
DJ
Posted by: DJ at February 19, 2004 09:19 AM
Weblogs are easy, RSS not so much. The main problems I'm facing with RSS on the intranet today are, in order of importance:
- security. How to integrate RSS with a corporate security system (e.g. one that relies on cookies)?
- find and integrate an RSS client. It's already a nightmare to add anything on a corporate computer set, if you can't convince the CIO that they need to ship a small plugin, an RSS client is no easier!
If you have recipes, I'm all ears ;-).
Posted by: padawan at February 19, 2004 09:28 AM