When RSS is finished doing all the discovering, sharing, collaborating, integrating, plumbing, networking, etc ultimately someone has to do the consuming. Its the consuming that creates the value proposition.

If the consuming is too labour intensive (primarily due to information overload) then value instantly evaporates. Making it easy to consume is the key to creating value.

I’m sure this “enterprisee RSS is dead” thread has amused you as much as it has riled you and other proponents of RSS.

From the beginning, the conversation had already driven off a cliff. People uninformed about RSS as an implementation detail generally adopt a definition of “enterprise RSS” that is an incomplete version of reality. The reality is that “enterprise ” has little to do with security or personalization or newsreading, and far more to do with enterprise-wide use of a technology, or even narrow use of a technology in a manner that would benefit the enterprise as a whole. If we take this [more realistic] definition of “enterprise ”, we can quickly dismiss assertions that “enterprise RSS” is dead. As you accurately point out, RSS is used by many businesses [widely and narrowly] to meet specific business requirements.

Before declaring Enterprise RSS dead, one must accept that it was (a) previously alive, and (b) defined in a manner which we all understand and agree. Since neither of these conditions were (or are) true, journalists must be cautious of making broad and sweeping assertions.

And even if there is no apparent (or obvious) mainstream adoption of “RSS reading” by corporate information workers, Marshall’s conclusions are disingenuous; there is no research or case studies I’m aware of that indicate RSS use in enterprises is something this market segment has given up on – ergo, opening the door to claim it is now dead.

What was (and apparently remains) alive is funding for enterprise RSS “stuff”. This includes highly visible evidence such as NewsGator funding, but more important – RSS-related initiatives ongoing in businesses of all types. My hunch is that every Fortune 500 has some sort of RSS effort or initiative underway or in planning stages.

From my own experience chatting with large organizations, many companies are paying their IT groups, 3rd party services, and consultants to help them produce both secure and customer facing RSS content. They are engaging in projects directly related to RSS such as better content syndication, mashups for intelligence gathering, content search, and integration with other applications both inside and outside the firewall. Given this more accurate version of enterprise reality, enterprise RSS is alive and thriving.

And intimating that RSS is dead because it hasn’t replace email is a silly notion; one is a protocol and the other is an application running on a protocol. Again, uninformed journalists tend to drive off a cliff on this point — RSS is simply an XML specification – it’s not even a standard (like SMTP is). It needs to be discussed in a context for what it is; an implementation detail. But more important (and often missed by journalists), because it is XML-based, it opens the door for a variety of interesting use cases (unlike email). Agile frameworks based on RSS induce many benefits – some are unintended innovations and many are not apparent or fully understood at first. Some RSS use cases are readily adopted without the users knowing that RSS is the underlying foundation. We can’t say these things about email.

What we *can* say about email is – “Email is where knowledge goes to die.” RSS has the capacity to mitigate the premature death of knowledge in the enterprise. I suspect you’ve personally seen cases where enterprise IQ has grown and enterprise amnesia has dissipated as a result of implementing RSS-based solutions.

This reminds me a of a very relevant blog post written in 2004 – http://myst-technology.com/public/item/56043

RSS is a unique and thriving beast – one that is widely used but not so widely recognized.