I've been having lots of conversations lately with John S. Hale, founder of MINDWEST Strategies, and the subject of content aggregation, enterprise RSS solutions, and media design challenges have sparked some renewed interest in a process that we've been fairly successful providing to large and small companies since shortly after MyST was founded.

Enterprise RSS - a term that doesn't really say much and is a bit ambiguous to boot - came into existence many years ago as RSS services and tools providers attempted to articulate an emerging new businesses requirement. Indeed, it turns out that, even in light of newer and faster methods of content dissemination, syndicated information is proving to represent a cornerstone (scratch that) the foundation of nearly all media solutions. And RSS is about to get its second wind; a real-time makeover that will create a magnitude of dependency growth on this already popular content format.

Today it's extremely difficult to find a web service that isn't providing access to content (especially your content) in one of the popular syndication formats. RSS has become an extremely bankable infrastructure and services that don't provide access to content through syndicated feeds are typically not favored.

John Hale caught me off-guard when he used the term "media fusion" in the context of news aggregation for focused (public) portals and for private intelligence solutions. His comment was enlightening because the term seemed magically meaningful. It describes the business objective that syndication formats provide and it's a better way to think about RSS - a term that should be treated with the same deference as ODBC. ;-)

While real-time RSS is stirring up a big vat of tasty media fusion possibilities with new protocols such as PubSubHubBubub and RSSCloud, Google is hinting that it may also impact the concept of search in a big way.

"(Ironically, the RSS feeds for these forums only include partial text descriptions, which is really irritating, and considered by most to be an RSS Worst Practice. An inflamed polyp, if you will.)" -- inkBlots

This is a silly and stupid remark. RSS is an XML specification designed to solve many problems; some would find headline-only feeds both beneficial and a business requirement. Sheesh... the RSS "community" needs to get their collective heads out of their collective asses and realize that business people don't want to behave like bloggers.

Charlie Wood recently observed the benefits of RSS for lightweight EAI (enterprise application integration). This is neither a new idea, nor is it one that you see often; perhaps because RSS is regarded as a specification by few and a feature by many. I blame the media for this misdirection.

"The original intent of RSS was to allow web sites to subscribe to each other's headlines. The technology's flexibility also allows enterprise applications to subscribe to each other's data. That's powerful stuff." - Charlie Wood

Indeed, very powerful. We use RSS in that capacity quite often - read more...