Ray Ozzie nails the value of RSS.
In a recent whitepaper, Groove founder Ray Ozzie writes:
The use of XML-based, technology-independent standards such as RSS is a key enabler for channels, as it permits a great deal of flexibility and personalization.
Ozzie goes on to provide a key insight on how the same information can mean different things to different people, and should therefore be published in a different format:
The distinction between workspaces and channels is often a personal or contextual choice, e.g., I may elect to be sent daily summaries of all new activity within your workspace, in which case your workspace is more of a channel than a workspace, as far as I’m concerned.
RSS will become a management tool to control the flow of information within an organization? Successful uses of RSS all provide an executive summary of massive amounts of news or changing information. Sobleizer is a great example. Robert Scoble reads 1300 blogs and summarizes them in 50 entries every day.
As standard business tools like SharePoint and Groove add RSS support, we may see the way RSS works in the blogsphere manifest itself within companies, unrelated to blogs: RSS helps you stay on top of massive amounts of information and lets you zoom in on what's interesting to you. [Live @ Sax.net]