Isnt RSS Just for News?

RSS has a somewhat convoluted and jaded past yet constitutes a standard that is extremely easy to use and versatile. It is an XML-based format for creating and distributing Web-based content. Thats itan RSS feed provides information and metadata about available data. An RSS reader examines that feed and delivers that information and metadata to the desktop. Users then can act on that information, typically fetching the Web data that interests them.

There are thousands and thousands of RSS feeds available on the Internet covering every subject imaginable. Yesterday I stumbled across one named Awful Plastic Surgery (is that redundant?). All major news organizations supply RSS feeds. Many blogs offer feeds so you can get the latest information on your favorite obsession. There are RSS feeds that notify you every time a new MP3 is available for download. Think of the 100,000 or so USENET newsgroups and all the weird subjects they cover. Multiply that by about five and you get the ideawhich probably is making you ask, Why do I care? Well, you probably dont care about a feed from alt.frugal.living, but you just may be interested in creating some corporate RSS feeds for distribution throughout the enterprise.

We really do need effective ways to impart information to the masses. E-mail can and does get lost or blocked. I find it necessary to scan the e-mails that get flagged as spam by our enterprise spam blocker because some very valuable stuff ends up in there. (Maybe valuable is too strong a word.) We learned a long time ago most people dont read memoranda or instructions. Besides, it isnt cool to kill trees just to discuss the corporate dress code. RSS may be an effective way to communicate throughout your enterprise.

Really Simple XML

Lets take a quick look at an RSS feedsee the box on page 14. What you are seeing was generated for me by Yahoo at http://news.yahoo.com/rss. You should check out that site; it is very simple and useful. I had Yahoo create an RSS news feed based on the term Insurance. The result was a URL we can use in a variety of waysthe easiest being simply to add it to the content list of an RSS reader (for a list of available readers, look here: http://blogspace.com/rss/readers). If you look at that URL in a Web browser, you are returned the pure XML feed. Examine the XML (I have removed some data to make it easier to read). As you can see, this is a very simple format. We start off with basic information of the XML and RSS versions we are using. Then comes the Channelwhich may be The New York Times or, in this case, a limited search of news stories. Actually, the title tag is the name of your channel.

Other useful information is available such as lastBuildDate. Your RSS reader can scan this and determine whether there is a new build and thus new data. TTL stands for time to live and indicates the number of minutes a channel should be cached before being refreshed. The elements we really care about here fall between the item tags. Each item represents a separate piece of data. You (or your client-side software) are free to do whatever you want with this data. The RSS reader I currently am using first alerts me via a little pop-up and sound that a new item is available. If I choose, I can click through to a Web page that takes the XML feed, wraps it in a meaningful manner, and displays the title, the pubDate, and the description. The URL is embedded in an HREF behind the title, so I can click through to the real data should I care to.

There are no requirements for the users to utilize a specific RSS reader. There are dozens of free and inexpensive readers available, but they are not really needed. We are dealing with a simple XML feed that can be used in a variety of ways. I may create a custom client-side application for my internal customers. I may decide to create a scrolling text box across the top of all corporate intranet pages. The feed could include useful and interesting information such as stock prices, corporate and competitor news items, latest NCAA scores, or whatever is deemed important and compelling for your particular organization. If you deal with independent agents and agencies, you may want to embed an RSS reader in the application submission software (which probably is Web based anyway). You could distribute configurable desktop applications that would allow your users to select RSS feeds they want in addition to your corporate feed. The possibilities are endless.

Push or Pull?

Creation of the feed itself can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Once again, there are many freeware and inexpensive tools available that have the ability to scrape a site or page and generate RSS-compliant XML (see a few at http:// Weblogs.about.com/od/rssfeedsdisplay/). A scraping tool might be useful for your internal HR page. Any changes could be noted immediately and fed to the enterprise. Likewise, an automated news search (not unlike the Yahoo example) could search other news sites for articles about your business and push them out. You notice I said push them outthat is because this is what RSS feels like. It isnt push technology, though. E-mail is push technology. An RSS reader periodically checks the RSS feed (which is just a URL) and pulls the new data to the client. That has some appeal to end users. They may feel more in control of an RSS feed than they may for a broadcast data feed.

I would think most organizations would create simple admin tools that would allow creation and dissemination of data via RSS and control over which channels the items are released. An informational message to the IT shop that internal IP addresses will be switched to a different subnet over the weekend is of no interest to the marketing geeks. All division heads can have the ability to control RSS feeds to their group only while general corporate information is made available to everyone. The independent agent channel would provide a limited subset of corporate information.

The Way-Back Machine

In the RSS example, we see <rss version=2.0>. Kind of makes you wonder whether there were or are only two versions of RSS available. Actually, there are six or seven versions in the wild. I mentioned above that RSS has a jaded past. Let me digress. First, a disclaimerthere are a few different versions of the history of RSS floating around the Internet. I will start with version 0.9, which was designed by Netscape for its My Netscape portal. RSS 0.9 was based on an earlier standard, RDF (which is a formal XML-based data model from the World Wide Web Consortium for machine-understandable metadata used to provide standard descriptions of Web resources). What Netscape produced was a stripped-down version of RDF it called Rich Site Summary. Netscape abandoned RSS, and thats when the trouble started. Two 0.91 versions were released in 1999, one by Dan Libby, a Netscape employee, and the other by Dave Winer, who was the founder of Userland Software. The two 0.91 versions were incompatible. RSS version 1.0 was published by Rael Dornfest in December 2000. The 1.0 version is even more interesting because it is based on the RDF specification rather than previous versions of RSS, so it is incompatible with everything (although it still is in use). Meanwhile, Winer progressed through versions 0.92, 0.93, and 0.94 before finally releasing the stable active core for RSS designated version 2.0. Version 2.0 is fully backward compatible with his original 0.91 version. 0.91 officially is deprecated but still in use because it works just fine with 2.0 for simple syndications. Now, the fun part. After all the divergent paths RSS has traveled, there was some concern users might be wary of adopting a standard controlled by Winer. The result was the RSS 2.0 specification donated to and released by the Harvard Law School.

Most organizations in our industry spend vast sums of money and occupy the time of many internal and external resources to disseminate and advertise new programs or funds or policies within and without the enterprise. RSS isnt going to replace any of these existing methods, but it seems to me it does provide an easy, inexpensive way to get the word out. It just might be worth a look. It is, after all, quite simple, in fact, elementary, my dear Watson.

Yahoo RSS News Feed
<?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8 ?>
<rss version=2.0>
<channel>
<title>Yahoo! News – Search Results for insurance</title>
<link>http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=insurance&ei=UTF-8</link>
<description>Yahoo! News – Search Results for insurance</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Copyright (c) 2004 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 07 Apr 2005 18:37:11 GMT</lastBuildDate>
<ttl>5</ttl>
<image>
<title>Yahoo! News</title>
<width>142</width>
<height>18</height>
<link>http://news.yahoo.com/</link>
<url>http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/nws/th/main_142.gif</url>
<item>
<title>Life without insurance a high-stakes gamble (MSNBC)</title>
<link>http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/search/insurance/really good link</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 Apr 2005 06:09:06 GMT</pubDate>
<description>Uninsured Americans are using many unique strategies in an
attempt to keep themselves healthy without going broke, as medical and
health insurance costs have soared in recent years.</description>
</item>
</channel>