Scoble, Ballmer and RSS
Microsoft’s Robert Scoble frequently offers good insight and great links. But I’m afraid today his wife may be right. When he blogged today about "the world" I can only hope he intended to say "my world."
RSS has totally changed how I work and how I get my information. In that sense, RSS has changed the world already and everything that comes now is gravy.
Don’t get me wrong, RSS is great. I publish it and consume it. In fact, one of the companies I founded, CustomScoop, recently added the ability to consume and publish RSS feeds of news clips and related information intelligence. It allows customers of that service to use it as a central monitoring platform — and to easily import reports into Outlook using Newsgator.
For me, RSS has made it easier to read lots of interesting information I might otherwise miss. In fact, I rely on Scoble and Steve Rubel, among others, to keep me up to speed on developments I should be aware of.
But RSS isn’t a widely used technology. It still services mostly geeks like us. Which is great — and we can serve as a megaphone for news and get it out to more people.
But RSS hasn’t changed the world. And Steve Ballmer may be right that it never will. I’ve addressed the problems with RSS in the past. I still think the concept holds promise for wider adoption, but the implementation has to become a whole lot easier. Which is why it is good to hear that Microsoft is looking at the next generation of the idea.