People on the panel (stolen from here): Matt Mullenwegg (founder of
WordPress) and Greg
Reinacker (founder of Newsgator) and some newcomers to the RSS
space: Charlie Wood
(Spanning Partners) and Stuart Watson (founder Syndicate IQ),
moderated by Sachi Gaha.
Enterprise Software as NewsGator Understands It
Gregg Reinacker:
“Enterprise software is all about easy deployment, desktop deployment,
no training…. Sort of the obvious things like management and
security.”
RSS is (will be) Plumbing
Charlie Wood: Uses customized RSS things, like a widget that
brings in sales leads. [This is the RSS as the new PointCast
angle: RSS is just the infrastructure/plumping. "The consumers will
never know it" -Stuart Watson.]
Blogging Makes You Suck Less
Matt Mullenwegg: “Blogging is a
trick by all the technologist in the world to stop your web pages from
sucking.” That is, it organizes your content and normalizes it, meaning
it’s easier, and even possible, to mix and mash.
The simplicity can replace the tediousness of larger CMS. This is
Whichard’s Dream of
Enterprise Blogging: no more Vignette.
Do I need a bunch of different feed formats?
Watson: RSS 2.0 seems like the winner. Mentions auto-discovery
stuff.
RSS: The Simple Integration Layer
Charlie Wood: you’ve got all these information silos that don’t mix
together [or do what you want]. So, you can use RSS as an
organizational layer on top of all that, the “dark informational
matter in your company” (dark, as in “dark fiber,” or
unused/hidden.)
Use RSS for information updates: status updates. E.g., “I’ve been
in companies where I spent 7 hours of the 40 hours a week in status
meetings. It was just brutal”: use RSS instead.
This is the biz angle of what Matt was saying above.
What Areas of the Enterprise Are Begging to be RSS’ified
…
Watson suggests creating portals that syndicate info, into the site
using RSS. But Matt says you need to add value to it, not just
syndicate content to get eye-balls. The value can be filters,
commentary.
Matt says tomorrow they’ll have 1/2 billion pings through
ping-o-matic.
Gregg: feeds from internal lead systems. References case from
TriplePoint. Dashboard, Outlook is a Dashboard, employee generated
portals.
What’s the RSS Toolkit Look Like in 2 Years?
Charlie: again with the “RSS is plumbing, it’ll be invisible to
users” angle.
Matt: never-mind the tools, make sure your content is good and
you’re using it for effective collab stuff.
Q & A
Rubel: Are people just going to do whatever MSFT provides?
Gregg: they help create the market for this stuff [the old
Crossing the Chasm angle: you gotta have two
analogs/competitors in the market, the old, and the
not-good-enough]. And gets more RSS out there.
Matt: “Yahoo! Mail has millions of users, but Outlook is still all
right. So I think you guys will be fine.”
Is there Technology to Filter Things Better?
Charlie: human filters are still [and will?] be the best?
“The PR depart. is saying the right thing, but nobody cares.”
“I’m guessing there’s very little business for/from press released
anymore.”
The question here being that people are freaking out about blogs
not being a controlled voice of the company. But, the PR department is
the controlled voice, and it’s ineffective ’cause it’s biz-speak.
[Man, maybe you could write a heuristic to identify PR crap. And
show a rating in bloglines so you could ignore or demote it. I guess Bullfighter
does that, more or less.]
Watson mentions attention.xml.
Gregg: we do press releases and blog about the topic at the same
time. “The PR stuff is a different pick-up [than blogging].”
Shel Israel: “which ones are picking up off the PR vs. the
feeds?”…a promise to answer later.
