RSS rival, Atom just got approved as an IETF standard - like a proper technology. You can read all the entire spec here. While Atom has certain syntactic differences, they are same the same concept - Web Feeds. Which incidentally, happens to be what MSFT has chosen to call its RSS support. Hopefully, this will fall through, tying up RSS/Atom content syndication with the "Web" may limit its own potential to evolve as a technology independent of the web. But Microsoft has succeeded in the  past in such matters - even some Unix geeks call directories as folders!! Meanwhile, there is new talk of an RSS3 standard - doesn't look all that official, but he is on /.

Buzzword slave Sun, has now aligned itself with RSS. Sun's VP Jonathan Schwartz plans to use RSS as a transport for developer communications and community building. Sun's Java community is a pretty active one, and it would be interesting to see them use RSS as a core technology for communication - perhaps take blogs and wikis to the next level. Of course, they promise better RSS support in something called JDS.. which would affect just about nobody. Why not use all those resource to build something that everyone can use? Like what Ximian did for Linux - perhaps a nice RSS based environment on top of common OSes?

to all you naysayers, the typically conservative IBM is embracing RSS based technologies with a greater vengeance than its Linux adoption. IBM had recently issues a corporate diktat encouraging its employees to use RSS based technology. Following that announcement, IBM recently announced it will be Podcasting investor information to start with and will expand it soon to present a commentary on current issues. Other companies reported to use Podcasts are Pepsi and GM.

Lance Ulanoff gets errie feeling from the 80s and 90s when Microsoft ate up competitors like Stacker, QEMM and other third parties who made Windows support tools, and fears that Longhorn/Vista will do the same for the burgeoning set of RSS clients in the market.

No surprises here, this is how operating systems work. No one blinked when Apple added RSS support in Safari. Having Internet Explorer only helped the internet grow, and it was Netscape's market to lose after bloated, buggy releases year after year.

This isn't any  more dangerous than the threat that Windows Address Book has posed to Contact/Address management programs. Even Outlook does not use WAB, which is supposed to maintain a global contact list in the operating system. RSS in Longhorn is all vaporware and Vista/Longhorn is almost 2 years from shipping.

Information week profiles a number of companies including Disney, ING, parts of the Justice Department and Microsoft who are quickly adopting RSS for internal use. The opt-in nature of RSS and the ability to target really specific content makes it really attractive for companies wanting to break the email/intranet communication impasse.

Companies are also looking at RSS as a data integration protocol. After the complexity of SOAP, the industry did try to create something called ICE that has not gotten much traction. The popularity of RSS makes it a possible replacement for ICE. The forever running EDI/Data Integration projects were replaced by EAI, where companies just gave up on integrating and just started putting a pretty face of old applications and data. RSS could push the EAI concept to finally unlock enterprise data.

So you have read all the buzz surrounding the release of Dave Winer's new OPML editor. Thus far, we have seen the use of RSS as an augmentation to large internet sites. Some limited uses of RSS has been seen inside an organization where a CxO might provide the vision to their department via a blog.

Outlining is one of those tools that has had a cult following, and what Dave is trying to do is bring some of the power of RSS's instant updates and freshness of content to collaborative outlining. AI looks at how this approach might work in a legal setting and points to these threads #1 and #2 for some discussions on uses of OMPL based outlining tools vs. the "traditional" email and IM - did I just call email and IM traditional?  Really Simple Groupware is what Dave likes to call it.

Tim Bray is Sun's man on the ground for all things RSS… oppss.. XML based content syndication protocols. While most users don't really care, Atom is hailed to be the successor by many to RSS, something about it being a standard. I think it all depends on how well Atom can beat the RSS mindshare esp. with Microsoft throwing its support being it and how quickly it can innovate to deliver a killer app, service. Meanwhile, Tim has this little page that maps all the differences, most feed readers are feed format agnostic and work with both standards relagating the format's importance to a geek curosity by most NewsReader users.

Historic Day! Dave continues to push the RSS envelope. His much fabled outline editor is now available (Windows only). He has ton of links on his site. The focus on OPML will enable a whole new set of applications. Shared outlines, each of which can be rich content or live up-datable content is a very powerful tool. Imagine, the OPML editor contains your list of projects at work and home, and each is shared with a different individuals - all updated in real time.

Is this the future of communication and collaboration? Can we finally get rid of the 20 year old "word processor, spreadsheet to compose and then email around endless revisions" paradigm? Given Dave's track record with keeping RSS on message and the aging office paradigm, this seems like a viable possibility.

This should come as a surprise to nobody. Google now allows the ability to add any RSS feed to its new personalized home page - Google Fusion.

Watch out Yahoo, Bloglines .. Microsoft . One surprise, a way to add Bookmarks, ok then watch out deli.ico.us, Pluck … .everyone else really!!

[via: micropersuasion]

Why would you want to combine multiple feeds into one? If you are connecting the feed into clients that can only access a single feed at a time - like the cool RSS Screensaver in Mac OS-X 10.4 (Tiger) or a hardware device / widgets etc… Other uses could be, combining all your favorite bloggers who update weekly into a single feed so you get your daily fix… Filtering by keyword feature gives you some more control. Here are some other ways to combine feeds in this excellent TUAW post.

[via: Techcrunch]

Red Herring (they are back?) summarizes the growing enterprise interest in RSS. NewsGator and KnowNow are the early movers in this space, with clients like ING. While most RSS companies are focused on the consumer side, enterprises are now waking up to the benefits of RSS- of what it offers beyond email, web browsers and databases for communication.

NewsGator reports executive level sponsorship and interest in large scale RSS deployments by many of their clients. While the exact set of the applications and server solutions still remain to be hashed out, the ubiquitous presence of RSS in the internet and the need of the enterprise for timely, contextual communication all point to RSS playing a significant role in the years to come.

Following up on the call to its internal employees to start using RSS based tools like Wiki and Blogs, IBM is walking the walk, by introducing blog tool support in the next version of Workplace. Workplace is IBM's new Notes/Office - replacement/killer and is supposed to be pretty cool. A free download of the blogging tool is available at IBM's developer site Alphaworks.

Also covered at eweek.

Rich Miller has this thorough write up on the security issues that may be uncovered with the broader adoption. The opt-in/ subscribe model of RSS does make it a little bit more secure than say, email. Pushing RSS for content delivery, software updates and media may require some new thoughts from a security point of view. With the coming adoption of RSS in the enterprise, many, like Verisign have already started work on RSS security products.

While Longhorn's RSS extensions have Dave's blessing, he is not so gung-ho about what Apple has done to enable Podcasting on iTunes, never mind that iTunes is shipping and Longhorn is a while away.

Perhaps, it is the fact that Apple uses "iTunes" in one of the tags. Apple should have talked to more people, but Apple is(traditionally) a hardware company, secretive before launches. It is hard for them to make sure they are not stepping over any  standards unless they can directly tie it into a hardware sales impact. They probably don't see RSS as that big of a deal.

Here is more from Tristan on using common namespaces. And, from Tim Bray as well.

With iTunes 4.9  and its excellent Podcast support, Apple has defined extensions to RSS that makes it work better with iTunes directory and store. Unlike Microsoft, the extensions are already here and being used in the copies of iTunes 4.9 being downloaded across the globe. Also unlike Microsoft, the rest of the world has little use of these iTunes specific changes at this point, but  that could change soon.