Blog tools are quite useful for building content and hosting RSS feeds from them, but that approach doesn't necessarily meet the requirements of all RSS publishing objectives.

Imagine you’re a business person and you have a web site with lots of pages. Now put yourself in her shoes – you want to create a feed that includes links to pre-existing web pages. How would you do that with a blog tool? Write the name, description, and anchor tag in the blog text area? That won't work for most users because the RSS feed would have a link to the blog post, and the blog post would have a link to the real item that the RSS author wants to expose. In short – this would require two clicks to get to the content with a stopover at a Weblog that wouldn’t make much sense for the content consumers.

What you need is a granular mechanism for creating and managing nodes within items (blog items) that also lives harmoniously with items that represent original content (like a regular blog post). You also need a way to transform these two unique collections of content as one feed, or different feeds.

Our platform already does this and much more because MyST recognizes that items (blog posts) may include collections of discrete links (with titles and descriptions) that are also easily transformed into any XML format.

"If they catch the vision of RSS and create and manage their own feeds, then the value of RSS is preserved. No middle piece would be needed to create the feeds for them or manage where they went. It would be pure, powerful RSS." --Dave McNamee

Dave couldn't be more right in his statement. Pure, powerful RSS. But what he doesn't mention are the huge numbers of information sources that are unable to agregate into RSS feeds for specific domains of interest. This requirement gives rise to some belief that creating, managing, and hosting RSS requires a "services" attitude and a platform for doing so - one that embraces and recognizes security and visibility in a user's context. Like Web pages, there are simply too many aspects of RSS that need to be condered as businesses roll out support for RSS-based content.

When philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," he could have been talking about the adoption of a disruptive technology like RSS.  History has shown that disruptive innovations have toppled established solution providers—not because the providers were unaware of the innovation, but because they believed it incapable of satisfying the demands of their established market. 

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen makes the following observations:

"Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches.  They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there.  They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."

RSS fits nicely into this model.  RSS is technologically straightforward, is built on widely accepted standards, and offers simplistic functionality.  Indeed, RSS lacks capabilities demanded by various established markets.  For example, Steven J. Bell, Director of the Library, Paul J. Gutman Library, Philadelphia University, recently wrote, "Nothing I’ve read or experienced while using RSS and news aggregators convinces me they are yet perfected enough to offer the fine-grain tuning that produces the control required for a true strategic approach to keeping up."  However, RSS has attributes that are highly valued in numerous "emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.".  This last point is key to understanding why (and how) RSS is, in fact, a disruptive innovation.

As Christensen also points out, "the purpose of advanced technology development [is] to sustain established trajectories of performance improvement..."  RSS has been widely adopted in several sizeable markets (e.g., weblogs, news syndication, corporate portals) and these markets will continue to demand improvements.  From the perspective of established RSS markets, these will be sustaining improvements.  However, it is likely that many of these improvements will address requirements of unrelated markets—say, for example, university library systems.  From the perspective of unrelated markets, these will be disruptive improvements; that is, "all of a sudden", RSS will become an attractive alternative to existing solutions.

This phenomenon is nothing new.  In response to Bell's article, Chris Pirillo offers a nice collection of examples of history repeating itself: the Web, NCSA Mosaic, and Windows.  In each case, its not like the established solution providers were unaware of the new technology.  In fact, they were the people explaining how and why the new technology was insufficient to meet the requirements of their market.

History is repeating itself with RSS.