RSS is getting a lot of press recently as being the big thing for 2006 and well it should. We’re still only scratching the surface of what can and is being done with RSS feeds. I mentioned today in a speech that I really feel like a good analogy is that RSS is where email was about 10 years ago. Everything is going to change and soon.
A few recent articles in CIO and ZDnet highlight RSS as being both “popular elements of a 2006 site” and “Internet trends to watch for in 2006.”
Richard MacManus, in his Web 2.0 Explorer blog points out some of the features all modern web applications must have. He states,
Expect 2006 to be the year RSS gets taken to the mainstream and baked into the products and services of big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo. It’ll also be the year when non-blog content and data gets turned into RSS on a much wider scale than we’ve seen before.
Those are the two major factors we’re looking at here – very large companies will essentially push it on to consumers through their products and RSS moving out of the shadow of being associated solely with blogs in people’s minds.
The CIO article also has some intriguing statements including,
Blogs come and go but RSS will remain
Hmm, I like that one, I’ll have to remember it for a future speech! They also state,
Companies that embrace RSS as a content format and use it to publish information to employees will have far greater success than with blogging alone. Enabling employees to subscribe to subject and department specific RSS feeds and then view them via readers will enable more targeted, community focused conversations in the workplace. And the ease with which postings can be viewed in an RSS reader will encourage more employees to participate. For RSS to be adopted however, companies will have to let their employees subscribe to both internal and external RSS feeds. If this happens, then I believe that in some companies blogging combined with wide adoption of RSS readers will become even more relevant than the company intranet.
RSS adoption is all about having those in charge of making decisions (whether they are business or personal), have a need for RSS. Your CEO will never embrace a strategy of incorporating RSS, if he or she doesn’t use a feed reader.
