Last night Bill French sent me a link to the ZDNet RSS Feeds page with a tongue-in-cheek note, "Do ya think this RSS thing is gonna catch on?" Of course, we've been forecasting the growing RSS adoption wave for a long time. Still, seeing the list of ZDNet feeds made me think, "Wow, I guess it really is heading toward mainstream." RSS is a disruptive force. It is changing the way people connect with information. I've long believed that the ultimate search technology is one you don't explicitly use. Imagine turning the search paradigm on its head—instead of us finding stuff, why not stuff finding us? Pushing this idea to the extreme, our applications would understand what we are working on and automatically provide us with exactly the information that we need in every specific context. In that scenario, we would never need to search for stuff because the right stuff would find us. This is the direction we're headed. We have a long way to go, but technologies like topic maps, smart tags, research services, and yes, RSS, are all bringing us closer. RSS lets you declare interest in specific subjects—encapsulated as channels—then sit back and watch new information automagically start finding you. Sure, you still need to go look in your newsreader to find stuff, but your newsreader organizes information into channel that you are specifically interested in, greatly improving the signal-to-noise ratio. And, the current generation of newsreaders is just the beginning. RSS is an XML standard (well, sort of) information interchange technology. RSS (the technology) will continue to recede behind the scenes and become an implementation detail underlying many, many applications just as HTTP, ODBC, and countless other technologies have done before. A decade ago, HTML made publishing information—for human consumption—cost effective on a global scale. RSS is making information interchange—for machine consumption—cost effective on a global scale. A decade ago, first movers were tooling up their HTML presence on the Internet; today's first movers are gearing up their RSS presence. Eventually, most businesses realized the benefits of jumping on the HTML train and so, too, will most realize the benefits of jumping on the RSS train. But this train is already moving fast and picking up speed every day. Many B2B and B2C value chains are already leveraging RSS to reduce time-to-awareness, capture precious attention cycles, avoid spam-related issues, increase search engine visibility, create a branded desktop presence, and so on. All aboard! |
