RSS Winterfest 2

Jay's takeaway: Criticizing blogging by looking at individual blogs is akin to denying the importance of books after looking at individual pages. Pages may inform but the power is in their aggregation into books. Individual blogs inform but a sea of blogs may change our lives and work. The sum is greater than the parts.

Back to realtime notes. I'm tuning in late and wandering in and out of the room. Chad Dierson and Bob Scoble are going to talk about enterprise apps. Chad is the CTO of InfoWorld. He's going to dicuss how InfoWorld uses RSS internallly.

RSS is so simple that it saves days of phone deliberations. Negotiating with other content providers is a snap, e.g. how to mark up a headline. (The slides are out of sync. Joking about how these slides are clunkier than RSS.) InfoWorld uses blogs to share information internally. Chad shows a page -- but notes that this is the first time he's really looked at the raw blog because he gets all this through RSS.

RSS as PR http://www.idc.com/en_US/st/rss/idcpressreleasees.xml
PR newswire http://rss.prnewswire.com

See www.newsgator.com/casestudies/triplepoint.aspx for more on using RSS in the enterprise.

RSS? RDF? Atom? InfoWorld chose RSS 1.0 because they need to exchange RSS with their sister companies. The public feeds are RSS 2.0. Chad uses Moveable Type (used to use Radio) because he wanted to be able to post from anywhere he was; Radio generally runs from one machine. No single system meets all needs.

IT choices are often top down, but with RSS, things can be bottom-up. ("We're bottom-up at InfoWorld. The desktops here are virtually uncontrollable.") We tell people to install whatever tool they want.

Scoble: Things won't take off (in business) until there's pressure to post. There's no cross-team collaboration until you can see who's posting and find them. You can import and export RSS feeds via SharePoint. We're constantly trying to evangelize RSS internally at Microsoft.

Rumor has it that Disney is using RSS internally.

Via .NET, you're going to be able to see live news notices in the sidebar of your browser. Put a few feeds right there.

We gave up on Groove because it wasn't apparent when someone added something new.

Some people mistakenly think that blogs are just diaries for teenagers' journals. They don't appreciate that this is a great way for people to collaborate.

NewsGator is a way to introduce things because "everyone at Microsoft lives in Outlook."

Scoble gets through to his own execs by writing things in his public blog. He posted something about SharePoint needing to incorporate RSS and heard back from the general manager within minutes.

Microsoft is trying to become more transparent. It's not fast enough for the revolutionaries.

At InfoWorld, a weekly column takes a week of leadtime -- for fact-checking, edit, etc. But when a reporter posts to his weblog, it's out there immediately.

InfoWorld uses Technorati and Feedster for market intelligence.

Robert Scoble, who is fighting the good fight to clue in Microsoft and make the company take the Cluetrain pill, kept pushing his mantra, "I read 1200 blogs a day in an hour." Then he threw in "plus 200 internal Microsoft blogs." As the day wore on, this morphed into 1,200 blogs in an hour or two.

Scobelizer magic

One hour = 3600 seconds.
1,200 blogs/hour = 3 seconds/blog
but.... Stop to read, say, 30 blogs. 10 take a minute to read, 10 take three minutes to read and contemplate. 5 take two minutes to read, comment, and pass along to someone else, and 3 require five minutes to read, interpret, reflect upon, and respond to the author.
So subtract (10 x 1) + (10 x 3) + (5 x 2) + (3 x 5) = 60 minutes.
That leaves 0 minutes to read the feeds in the first place.

Something here is overevangelistic.

Posted by Jay Cross at January 22, 2004 09:35 AM | TrackBack