Still Early For RSS

I'm giving a lunchtime talk on the use of weblogs for business at the September 29 meeting of the Boston's KM Cluster group.  The talk is titled, "Weblogs:  Affectation of the Digerati, or Mainstream Business Tool?"  The talk reprises a presentation of the same name I gave last year at a meeting of the local chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, and revisits my conclusions based on my experiences and other developments since then.  In prepping for this, I came across some very interesting research on RSS penetration  and associated demographics by Forrester. 

RSS will be big eventually for a number of reasons:

1. RSS is a huge time-saver.  I use NewsGator's add-on aggregator for Outlook, which collects updates to RSS feeds from blogs, news sources, and other things I subscribe to.  I can plow through a month's worth of stuff I try to keep up with for both professional and personal reasons in just a couple of hours.  

2. RSS is spam-free (although Google has now filed for a patent on including ads in RSS Feeds).   You opt into what you want to see, rather than having it pushed at you.  Over time, this will allow further tightening of spam filters.  This will accelerate the adoption of RSS, on both the user side as well as on the commercial side as marketers respond to this adoption, and the concurrent decline in the effectiveness of email.

3. There's lots of innovation going on here, and someone will break through.  However, I think it will be extensions to RSS  that will drive commercialization, more than efforts to leverage the existing standard.  Success of these commercialization efforts will hinge not only on the intrinsic value of the extension idea, but on the popularization of the extension – i.e., the degree it becomes as popular as the underlying RSS standard. 

4. Just as Apple just added podcast subscription support into its iTunes client, RSS subscription support is an obvious next feature for Outlook.  Outlook's practically total market penetration provides lots of gasoline for when this match is struck.

Notwithstanding the value of #'s 1-3 above, it's really #4 that will be the key to adoption.  My scan doesn't suggest Microsoft is moving too quickly on this, and others are skeptical too. 

Basically, as easy as it is to buy and install NewsGator, and as useful as it is, doing so is still an "Affectation of the Digerati" :-) So, I figure it's still at least three years too soon for RSS as a mainstream channel for marketing and service.