Interesting edition of the Gillmor Gang this
week, focusing on RSS and Web content models. The guests were Stephen O’Grady from analyst firm Redmonk and
Rafat Ali from the excellent
PaidContent.org.
Event-driven
Jon Udell launched into an
interesting spiel around the 18 minute mark. He talked about some of the usage scenarios
for RSS in the enterprise. Basically his point was that RSS is not just about
collaboration, it’s also an event-driven technology that can be used to monitor business
processes. In Jon’s words:
“…it [RSS] does play into product offerings that we will be seeing from the likes of
Sun, IBM, Microsoft – and it’s more than just person-to-person communication. It’s
process-to-person, process-to-process, it’s event messaging, notifications.”
He cited KnowNow, who offer an “event network as
an integration platform”. [note to self: I must listen to Jon’s podcast about
KnowNow]
Most bloggers (myself included) tend to natter on about the social aspects of RSS –
collaboration, two-way communication and so forth. So I like the phrase “event network”,
because it emphasizes the time-driven aspect of RSS that is often overlooked in favour of
the more glamourous social software angles.
Jon also noted that people can integrate and combine streams of content – for example,
you could take a Feedster-indexed query and “make
that query into another feed”, or a del.icio.us tag
could become “a feed that feeds into something else.” This line of thinking complements
my posts last week about topic/tag/remix feeds [post one, post two].
RSS Revenue Strategies
Rafat had some interesting things to say about how RSS is playing out in the
marketplace. He mentioned that Feedburner has
“yet to come out with a viable revenue strategy” – which I think he said to illustrate
that the RSS/content business is still nascent and clear revenue streams have yet to
emerge from it. As for his own business, Rafat said he hasn’t yet sold RSS as a media
option to his sponsors. He isn’t sure about the “viability of RSS audience” – will it be
a separate buy from the Web/email/etc audiences.
Re-defining Analyst
There was a bit of back and forth between the Gang and the guests about that old
chestnut: are bloggers journalists? Also asked: are bloggers analysts? Stephen O’Grady’s
company Redmonk is styling itself as a new kind of
Analyst service, meaning:
“Assimilating the most information possible from the most sources – and that means
having as many conversations as possible.[…] you need transperency, you need a degree
of open source, you need all the things that blogging and open source and everything else
can provide.”
Rafat said he is still a journalist, but he sees himself as “a quasi-analyst” these
days – he “assimilates all this information”, presents it as such and tries to make sense
of it. But unlike a traditional journalist, he gives his point of view. Rafat is at the
same time trying to build a media company, so he’s also an entrepreneur.
Summary
Another fine Gillmor Gang production. If I may make a request, I’d love to see them
snare an interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher and/or Feedburner’s Dick Costolo. Or
Technorati’s Dave Sifry, or Scott Rafer from Feedster, or PubSub honcho Bob Wyman. I’m interested in the Gang exploring the emerging RSS marketplace some more.
