CNet news.com reports that RSS is moving into the business realm, with the release of a new application for sharing calendar data over the Internet.

RSS applications let online publishers automatically send Web content to subscribers, giving readers a powerful tool to compile news headlines on the fly from several sources at once. The RSSCalendar program allows a user to convert and publish calendar data as an RSS feed. Friends, co-workers and customers can subscribe to the calendar feed and automatically receive notices of new appointments, which can be viewed through an RSS reader or imported to a Web-based calendar or Microsoft Outlook.

Developer John Pacchetti, who released a trial version of RSSCalendar late last month, says:

It's a project I created just from considering some of the uses where RSS could be a good vehicle. Calendars seemed like the most relevant use I could think of. I've built some pretty complex calendar systems that are Web-based, and this was a way to take a new approach.

An interesting use of RSS, I admit. We faced the same problem of a shared calendar that allows us to book appointments and plan things with and on behalf of others. Microsoft exchange server was considered and then rejected as an overkill for what we needed. We chose one of the web-based calendar tools that seems to work just fine. But it is good to see the familiar (and efficient) RSS technology being used for yet another practical purpose. Let's see how it goes.

A basic explanation of RSS:

RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

RSS feeds are composed in XML, which is a very simple markup language. Similar to HTML, XML uses tags to identify fields.

The beauty of RSS is that readers can quickly scan headlines (titles) and read articles of interest. Because the information is condensed and provided in a single location users can generally review more information in a shorter time frame. Additional information is only a click away. Best of all readers choose the feeds they wish to see, there is no spam with RSS. If you are not completely thrilled with the content appearing in a feed simply remove it from the newsreader. The technology is a pull technology rather than push technology, meaning the content is not forced on the consumers, who pull the content they want to see.

Yes, the last sentence is the main reason why I link to the article here. Pull, not push.

A good article in PR Week about RSS. Its thrust is aimed at PR and marketing professionals but there are some good descriptions of RSS and its uses. Makes an overdue point about ineffectiveness of email and web-sites.

RSS, which stands for real simple syndication, has begun to extend past early adopters. The essence of RSS is that it brings websites to the user, who otherwise has to chase the website. In order to enable this, you need the website that you wish to view to provide RSS feeds and a piece of software that can read those feeds.

Worth a glance. At least they quote Dave Winer.

As mentioned before here, Jason Calacanis has a rather different model for business blogging than we do at The Big Blog Company. Probably the main reason we see things differently to Jason is that we have radically different views on the efficacy of advertising. Jason's view, on the face of it, is the same as ours when he says:

I’m down with the whole disruptive advertising is dead thing. I hate commercials, and I fast forward through them on my Tivo too.

Which is exactly our view too. But the next remark in Jason's article is:

However, our strategy of having one great big advertisement per blog is really working for advertisers.

In other words: "I hate advertising! Advertising sucks! Now here is a message from our advertiser". Riiiight.

However the purpose of this article is not to bash Jason Calacanis, to whom I really do wish every success, but rather to say why we will never, ever, ever recommend to a client of ours that they stick advertisements in their RSS feeds. To paraphrase Jason, interruptive advertising is dead. It is worse than dead, actually, it is of negative value as it damages the appeal of your brand. Not only do I not want to listen to a 'message from our advertiser' when you decide I should listen to one, I will actively take measures to ensure I do not. It is called the 'back' button. Ciao babe, the customer has escaped. Elvis has left the building.

Sorry but advertisements do not provide 'amazing value' to the person reading them or useful information to me unless I actually want to see them. Given that the very raison d' être of RSS syndication is to streamline and aggregate lots of content to prevent information overload, adding something that is noise, not signal, to an RSS feed is tantamount to telling the person who has the feed "Sorry, but we are not going to allow you any say in how you access our information". If I can just about (sometimes) tolerate a banner advert by just ignoring it, I cannot ignore an advert forced into a medium designed to deliver only what I want. No way.

I could write out my reply to such a notion of interfereing with what I want to do but a well know gesture would convey my feeling on that very succinctly. Rule One of PR and marketing: do not piss off the customer... and by shoving something under my nose without so much as a 'by your leave', you are indeed pissing me off and it is not like there is any shortage of alternative places for me to take my eyeballs where folks are not annoying me.

It is extremely easy to add an RSS feed to an aggregator. It is just as easy to remove one as well.

Dave Winer's message to advertising people and to those who still consider advertising relevant and/or necessary:

I'd like to remind people who say that RSS needs advertising that the whole equation is flipped upside down, and advertising is the least interesting way to flow information via RSS. Consider that I might subscribe to feeds that contain commercial information that one might otherwise see as advertising. For example, I'm in the market for a bunch of products that don't exist yet. I'd love to be able to subscribe to a feed that alerts me when they exist. Then of course I'll pay money, and someone will profit. I'll write about it again, in the meantime, if you want to brush up, read The Cluetrain Manifesto and repeat after Doc Searls:

There is no demand for messages. There is no demand for messages. There is no demand for messages.

Remember folks, you're not living in the same economy, this one is decentralized, not a monoculture, and doesn't follow the same rules. Them that invest in buggy whips are going to to have buggy companies.

Amen to that.

There is a superb article by Steve Gillmore in eWeek on email vs IM vs RSS.

Similarly, lack of IM interoperability has diluted the value of each IM platform. A kind of de facto platform has emerged, in which social networks and their directories become the routing infrastructure for point-to-point communications.

The winners will likely emerge from the IM components, when presence, awareness and role-based routing to devices are encapsulated in an API set.

And finally, the elephant in the room: RSS. While INBOX wrestles with the intractable problems of blurred international boundaries, too-complex authentication solutions and too-expensive computational and payment schemes, more and more of us are routing around e-mail for all but the most basic services.

IM for supply-chain communications, social networks for collaboration spaces, and RSS as the glue that ties these data points together.

This real-time services fabric is that deadliest of competitors to e-mail: It shifts attention slowly and surely away from a producer-consumer economy to a publisher-subscriber ecology. Publishers use transparency to establish credibility, then trade that authority for a reliable connection with their customers.

In this new context, the customer - not the company - controls the conversation. Or to paraphrase Anthony Lye, RSS is the property of individuals, not companies. That's why we fell in love with e-mail in the first place.

Pull, not push and all that....

Doc Searls blogged about an email from a friend that said that RSS is opt-in authenticated Email. That got a disagreeing response that prompted him into a deeper analysis:

Obviously, RSS isn't e-mail. But what might it bring to email that isn't there now? In a word, relationship. Mail is, essentially, personal. That it also carries invoices and other necessary institutional correspondence does not make it less so. Institutions (such as public utilities and government agencies) are social millieus too. As a form of mail, e-mail is also, essentially, personal. And when people correspond with any persistence, they don't just converse. They relate.

Now think about the relationships supported by what RSS provides: notification, subscription, syndication. The first two give new meaning to the third, when you think about what can be done to make email as personal as mail was in the first place. I would gladly subcribe to writers whose correspondence is accompanied by an RSS notification. I would gladly syndicate my willingness to relate with people who know me, within the context of an email system that respects the meaning of the verb relate.

And then, in the spirit of Cluetrain, supported by some more interesting concepts such as three tiers of identity, Doc Searls produces some very intriguing pictures. I am going to put them up here, because I think they are an exquisite illustration of what is wrong with marketing and how to approach it.

What we hate about email is that "marketers" in Tier 3 use it to "penetrate," "capture" and otherwise insult us in Tier 1:

What we miss about old fashioned mail is simple relationships between Tier 1 and Tier 2: between ourselves and everybody else:

If we can get that from e-mail, by making it re-mail — relationship mail — and make Tier 3 go away, would it be worth the effort?

Doc Searls ponders:

Can those three verbs (notify, subscribe, syndicate) from RSS give us the relationship-support tools we need to solve both the identity problem and the email problem along with it?

To me all this makes sense. I do not know if this is a solution to the identity problem but the above is sufficiently thought-provoking that I am relaying it to our audience. Let's keep thinking about this.

Here is also a link to the whole presentation by Doc Searls about the concept of identity in communication in the corporate world.

I missed this article by Chad Dickerson of Infoworld about his suggestion that instead of trying to manage complexity, IT people should look for simplicity. It is a point from our book, so I am going to blog about it now.

You read about IT complexity in vendor marketing materials, consultants offer to help you manage complexity, and people like me write about it in the IT press. Complexity is something that many IT professionals have come to accept in their daily work, but what if we turned the complexity discussion on its head and focused our efforts on managing simplicity? Managing simplicity means seeing through some of the complexity hype and making a concerted effort to look for the simplest solution to IT problems. In my experience simple solutions often deliver value at a reasonable cost, whereas many complex ones produce only headaches.

He then proceeds to give an example from his own experience:

The temptation always exists in IT to over-engineer solutions to simple problems. When I first started at InfoWorld, I was handed a quarter-million dollar quote for a portal solution from a vendor who will remain nameless. In this particular case, the need for a portal or portal-like functionality had not even been identified within the company, but someone in my group had been seduced by a vendor. After sitting through a pitch about how our employees could receive customized and up-to-date industry news, stock quotes, and about how they would be able to share knowledge with one another, I spoke to our employees about their needs. The primary request was for easy access to traffic analysis for InfoWorld.com. I killed the portal project, put up an Apache server running Linux on existing hardware, and hand-coded HTML links to our Web site traffic analysis software.

We’ve since outgrown that level of simplicity and need to focus more on enabling collaboration among decentralized teams. Although the quarter-million dollar portal would probably fulfill our current needs, I’m planning to experiment with Movable Type instead. With a centralized Weblog publishing system that automatically pushes out RSS content, InfoWorld employees can post information to a company Weblog, consume the updates with an RSS news aggregator, and search the knowledge base it creates. Not a full-fledged "portal" perhaps, but a simple and elegant knowledge management application that solves a set of problems in a very simple way (and at a cost of about $150 for a commercial license plus a little staff time).

Let's take note as this is a very useful example. (As you can see, the article was the basis for the Inforworld 8internal blog that is the subject of the previous post). Perhaps, with this kind of arguments, we could get even IT professionals on our side. After all, these are emergent times... Any ideas?

Radio Free Blogistan brought to our attention the case of the Lockergnome feed that has adverts in it that do not appear on the main website.

What I do not like about the Lockergnome strategy is that they are not identifying the ads as such. They are just another headline in the feed. What would they call it, though? Sponsored content? Editorial? Aditorials?

A very bad practise indeed. Unless they were merely demonstrating the point of the blog entry they made a few days back on RSS as Rudely Syndicated Spam...