John Robb gives his view (one which I agree with) on the value of RSS feeds, after finding that he has subscribed to 115 feeds:
RSS subscriptions are much more than just automated bookmarks that take the pain and hassle out of browsing for relevant content. They also allow me to quickly repurpose the content as content on my weblog — all I have to do is hit the post button next to any item I want to comment on. RSS can also be a fantastic delivery system for large content via enclosures. One important point to remember is that unlike bookmarks, RSS subscriptions don’t atrophy — they live until they are actively deleted.
On a related note, this is the comment made by Jeremy Allaire in relation to Jon Udell’s Team Blog comment:
All of a sudden the world of weblogs is colliding with other established team collaboration and work productivity spaces such as content mangement, knowledge management and enterprise portals.
To what degree will Blog Readers become a natural client software category; will they be part of browsers; of communications/messaging apps (Outlook/Notes); standalone? As RSS 2.0 gains traction and the content moves from being simple text content to richly tagged meta-data and more or less structured content (like ‘system status reports’, ‘bi data’, as Jon suggests), what’s the proper productivity interface for digesting and regurgitating all that data.
I believe that a “new desktop” can be designed around the microcontent client, built around a digital dashboard and news readers, with the backend integrated with enterprise events, available via RSS. Will take this discussion up in a forthcoming Tech Talk series.
