Gavin’s Digital Diner

Call me irascible. When RSS started showing up on this or that, I wasn’t all that thrilled. I was skeptical. Moreover, it reminded of PointCast,” circa 1995. With some shame [looking at my feet and blushing], I admit that I liked PointCast.

I say that with one caveat: PointCast, you see, was designed, inherently, for the individual. As such, it really couldn’t and wouldn’t adapt itself to an institution. That was its death knell. What killed it was its inherent personal nature. It was famous for its Oliver Twist-like attitude towards bandwidth. PointCast could, and did, eat a T1 for breakfast, and come back saying, “please sir, I want some more.” IT departments quickly banned it all together, blocking ports, clamping bandwidth; a sad end for a screen saver run amok.

At first blush, RSS seemed just a little too much like PointCast, with a high possibility of uselessness. To be frank, it struck me as yet another way to fill my day, fill my mind, and fill my screen with more-than-likely useless trivia. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am very fond of trivia — I have a head full of it. I can, for example, name all eight James Bonds, in order, by movie; terribly useful stuff, really. But the web has enough of it to keep my meter pegged.

[There is controversy around two of the eight, btw. "Eight?," you say, "Nah, there were only six." Nope. Eight. You'll find the other two actors in the same film in which you meet James' son, Jimmy Bond.]

I am also not particularly fond of acronyms that are based on more acronyms. RSS, you see, is (or was) originally short for “RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary.” Not one to let a good acronym die young, the acronym fairies have, since successively morphed it into first “Rich Site Summary,” then “Really Simple Syndication,” and, finally, “Read Some Stuff.” I like the last one for its clarity.

RSS seems to suffer the same problems as PointCast. It’s inherently personal. That focus on the individual, by the way, is my overall critique of much of the current Web-Two-Dot-Oh stuff. Designed for the individual, it’s a headache to adapt for enterprise. It’s great for the individual, but bring it in to an organizational environment and there’s hell to pay.

Let’s take Skype, for example. It drives me nuts. There are few way to incorporate Skype into an organization. It doesn’t scale, there is no central management; hell, you can’t even set up a central address book. Tying it into existing telephony systems, is, shall we say, an adventure. I have some ideas: there are some new ways to marry Skype to your PBX. I’ll visit them in a later post.

With things like Blogs, Wikis, and social networking in general, institutions and organizations don’t quite know what to do. Even a recent call for organizational examples of “non-profit blogs” over at NetSquared failed to turn up more than a handful of nominations. The simple reason — despite the hype that “everybody must get blogged” — may be that the tools don’t fit organizational needs. The fact is that many organizations already have an “institutional blog” It’s called a web site.

Don’t get me wrong, I think these tools are great, maybe even revolutionary, in a personal and community sense. But for an institution, one must ask: What’s useful and why, and what’s just a waste of time? For some it will be right, for other’s it will be a waste of time.

To quote a wise sage and experienced communication’s maven: “I think the rule here is ‘no rules’.” These tools will be right for some, and not for others. Of those where it’s “right,” I can think of two great examples. Unabashedly I admit they’re both run by people I know, admire, and respect. The first is Ellen Miller’s SunLight Foundation, I think, it’s a great example of an institutional blog, and the second is Roger Craver’s TheAgitator.net. Both well worth adding to your RSS reader. In both cases, the medium fits the message.

Let’s get back to the question at hand. Philosophical points aside, technically and operationally RSS presents a series of institutional problems, challenges, and questions:

1. How could or should I incorporate it into the enterprise?
2. What were my options, what were the available tools and practices?.
3. What role can it, or should it play compared to the myriad other information flows and sources?
4. How would or could I balance its role against costs, both real and opportunity?
5. What neat tricks could I do with it to enhance access to information?
6. How could I use it to increase productivity?
7. How could I use it to increase our knowledge and, thereby, directly enhance the work that we do?
8. What is the institutional response to the need for some sort of reader or aggregator?

Heady questions, and I don’t have the answers to all of them, or even most of them, yet. But there is more to RSS than meets the eye. RSS is not as “personal” as I thought. RSS has a great facility for delivering information between machines. This is important. This got me thinking.

This got me thinking: I could use it to feed my Intranet. I could use it to supplement and enhance the myriad of information sources we were already compiling both electronically and manually, and feeding into our systems. If I did that, I would have an institutional approach to some of this information. I’d have a way to bring it into the organization and then redistribute it. It would be manageable and scalable; no resource glutton á la PointCast. It would enhance productivity, not detract from it.

All I needed was some sort of institutional way to capture RSS information and regurgitate it on my own Intranet. Initially my search was fruitless – there were individual readers, some free and some not so free. Most were designed for the desktop, and there were a few online aggregators/readers, such as Bloglines, but nothing quite right. There was that pesky problem again — everything is designed for the individual.

[Ok, I admit it. This is one of my pet peeves about content providers too. Very, very few information providers offer any sort of institutional way to access their information. Take The New York Times. We subscribe to the hardcopy. We get 5 copies. We read it. We clip it. We pass it around. We generally chomp it up into tiny pieces on a daily basis. Everybody within the organization has access. We keep a copy on every floor. But, to provide access online do I really need to have 130 different accounts? When the Times, in its wisdom, decided to lock the editorial page into their TimesSelect service, I was stumped. The DRM on the TimesSelect service is so onerous that I don't even think the subscriber can legally read it. It's insane. The DRM is idiotic and insulting. Moreover, it locks out the enterprise subscriber.

As far as I can tell, nobody is designing their access and authentication systems to allow institutional access. Everyplace you go, you login with your email address, period. Even organizations that have institutional memberships (like GEO, TAG, COF, GuideStar, Foundation Center, etc) fail to offer any form of institutional access. By that I mean they all require individual authentication, making that access difficult to manage and impossible to scale for the enterprise. Guidestar does a better job than most. Ah, well, enough ranting and back to the subject at hand.]

How to integrate RSS with enterprise was solved, to some extent, by time’s arrow. In the intervening months while I pondered, with the release of IE7, RSS readers became standard components on the desktop. One problem solved. I won’t have to deploy, support, and explain yet another desktop app. It doesn’t solve the redundancy issues, nor the shared informational issues, nor the bandwidth wasting. I’ll still have to explain RSS, but that’s getting easier. ’sides, I can demo it easy enough. A picture is worth a thousand words.

With the release of Outlook 2007, btw, you get a “common RSS repository” – shared between IE7 and Outlook. In a nutshell, RSS subscriptions in IE7 show up in a folder in Outlook, and visa-versa. It’s not for me, as it seems to slow OL down, but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s still an individual response, however. I was looking for an enterprise approach of some sort.

After the head scratching, I found what I was looking for with some creative use of a remarkable, free WebPart for SharePoint. For those of you unfamiliar with SharePoint, a WebPart is like a widget — it’s a little, self-contained web-thing you can drop on to a SharePoint based website. Once there, you can move it around on the page, and generally tweak how it looks. Drop one copy on a page, and you have one widget; drop two copies, and you have two widgets.

This particular web part was an RSS reader, made by Tim Heur over at SmilingGoat. Drop it on a page and give it one or more RSS URLs, and you’re done. The feeds show up on your Intranet, structured, centralized, manageable. If you’re on MOSS2007, you don’t need the help of the Goat. MOSS came with a standard RSS reader WebPart and the ability to syndicate any SharePoint list via RSS right out of the box. Since everything is a list in MOSS, that means that everything can be chomped, gobbled, and regurgitated using RSS.

Nevertheless, once I had that institutional approach, I went wild. Anything delivered RSS I could consume and serve via the Intranet. Cool. Now every time I saw the orange RSS badge, I had to stop and think: “Is this something I should/could put on the Intranet?”

Here’s what I think is a pretty neat example – using the SharePoint RSS Reader and Google. The real neat trick here, by the way, is Google. The fact that you can set up any sort of news query on Google and then “feed” the results as RSS is phenomenal. That trick, combined with an Intranet-based aggregator provides an institutional approach to using RSS for some pretty neat things.

Here’s another example (below) where I use a SharePoint list to feed other pages within the same SharePoint site. In SPS2003, I took a third party web part that turns any SharePoint list into a feed. [In MOSS2007 (SharePoint 2007) this functionality is built in.] What you get is a roll-up. You can aggregate multiple lists into a single list on another page. Very handy for, say, departmental announcements that all roll-up into a single organization-wide announcements page. Or you can set up relatively “ugly” document collections, and use RSS to feed them in a pretty format to another site, or another web page. Just makes it easier to build “pretty” public (or not so public) facing sites with more utilitarian lists feeding them.

Here’s a sample MOSS site that I setup on a dev server in (and I timed it) 33 minutes, using OOTB (out of the box) WebParts, some creative use of Google and Delicious, and a little hacking on the XSLT to make it look the way I wanted on the page. On the left, it shows three Google news feeds covering the organization itself and two areas where we have programmatic interests. On the right, I stirred the pot and added three “Tag feeds” from Delicious. Yummy.

An Enterprise Approach to RSS

Once I had the tools in place, what I could do — at basically no cost — was phenomenal. And, these were at least tools that allow me to manage [some say mangle] and scale the information institutionally rather than individually.

All in all, the possibilities are endless, and, damn it, that’s a problem too. Now it’s back to paying attention to the first law of effective knowledge management: “Know what to keep, and why” (the 80 percent of everything is garbage rule). As usual, tools never solve the problem. Sometimes they even make it more difficult. RSS is no exception. Once again, answering the question turns out to be easy; asking the right question turns out to be tough.

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