Ross Mayfield wrote about the Disney Enterprise Weblogs and Wikis, and had some interesting conclusions about RSS:
- RSS feeds and Weblog software are useful for multitude of business need where information flow is critical. Its not about opinion its about information flow
- RSS feeds are for much more than weblog syndication
- Use of RSS feeds is inexpensive comparatively
- RSS aggregation into Outlook integration was critical.
- Client side aggregation needs to move toward server side aggregation
- Need for authentication is immeadiate
I agree on all points. Not sure about Outlook though.
Dave Fletcher adds that “the State of Utah is using weblogs for a variety of purpose, including content management, customer contact management, news services, etc. and has even more on the drawing board. It provides a VERY cost effective solution for many business needs.”
In Denmark, RSS is now an officially recognised standard for e-government, since it has been included in the Reference Profile, which itself is available in RSS. If anyone has problems with feeds like this, please let me know. I want to do things right. I’m not sure my extensions are OK (they do validate OK though). While the content feeds are in RSS 2.0 only, we have been pragmatic and recognised both RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 in the reference profile. I wonder whether we should add Atom? It should at least be there as “Emerging”, I suppose. Atom still has a long way to go, and I think a complete “migration” to an Atom-exclusive service is premature and “ideological”. I’m going to promote RSS and support Atom, because it in theory has a great potential, partly for doing something else than RSS, but perhaps over time also to do what RSS does today. But I don’t see me leaving RSS anytime soon.
Now, which RSS is the best/safest then? Until I saw W3C’s announcement about RDF and OWL, which might give RDF, hence RSS 1.0, a revival, I would say that if I should choose only one RSS, it would be RSS 2.0. Now I am not sure. Fortunately, I don’t have to accept this as a Highlanderish “There can be only one” battle. There can be two, there can even be three, although it gets messy (or dynamic…).
