| Think Outside the Feed | Thoughts on the emerging use of RSS by Bill French and F. Andy Seidl, Co-founders of MyST Technology Partners. | |
| | | July 30, 2004 | | RSS can be used for casual training and awareness programs. | CRM is not one of my core competencies, but I wanted to learn more about it to be able to communicate effectively with some of my customers. So, using a simple, programmable feed from InsightExec, I was able to create a useful set of feeds that periodically give me new insight [pun intended] on a variety of topics relating to customer relationship management. Initially, my training program consisted of simple feeds such as any new item published on InsightExec about 'CRM'. As I began to learn more about this subject I started to focus on other topics like meta-marketing and customer-centricity. It's easy to program feeds from InsightExec—simply use this URL template to construct queries: http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/aggregate/38814?
model=user/myst/user-insightexec-search2rss&query=%22customer+profitability%22 Ideally, InsightExec will eventually provide an RSS feed builder option on their search page so that you can use their search engine to construct queries and then have the URL ready to go to streamline the subscription process. The benefits of RSS for casual training purposes is undeniable. The content flows into your RSS reader at periodic intervals and gently nags you to learn. Imagine a universal portal (public or internal for corporate use) that does nothing more than help people to collect feeds that will help them learn about subjects they care about. The portal packages their learning interests into RSS collections that can be subscribed to with a single click. Taken a step further, imagine the RSS reader for the learning process is Macromedia Flash™ and it delivers a rich environment that carries brands about the technologies you are studying as well as audio and video resources relevant to the learning feeds selected. | | |
| | July 28, 2004 | | We have the machinery to take a snapshot of an RSS feed... but what benefit could this provide? | Is this an important capability, or a feature looking for a problem? I think compliance issues will eventually emerge with RSS, but I'm out of touch with the specific types of services where rigid requirements exist for information sets that change frequently. But we have the ability to snapshot a feed at regular intervals, wrap it in a signed package, and persist it in a secure (even encrypted) database. We can also capture meta-data about each version such as which links in the feed were broken, how many items there are, the size of each item, date information, and other factors important to a compliance test. | | |
| | July 16, 2004 | | Although I'd love to take credit for inspiring ITI to provide these feeds, it's clear they were on this track all along. | EContent RSS Feeds "We are pleased to make the content from EContent magazine, EContentMag.com, and the EContent xTra enewsletter available via RSS to provide our readers with another way to keep up to date on the information they need to make decisions about digital content." This is a great resource and I love the programmable Most Popular Recent Articles. This level of detail makes it possible to customize your feeds to exactly the content that will help you most. RSS is about having content your way, and attention to detail like this appreciated. | | |
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