RSS is most often discussed as one of the features that separates a blog from a traditional Website. I’ve heard it said that if a site doesn’t syndicate, it’s going to become irrelevant.
But there are uses for RSS that have nothing to do with the Web at large, one of which David Berlind discussed today over at ZDNet.
Berlind sees the RSS - in conjunction with the use of wikis - as the new protocol that makes the corporate intranet function and facilitates true collaboration.
Before the invention of RSS, says Berlind, collaboration was stilted by the “Draconian technologies” that supposedly enabled it. To work as a team, you’d have to schedule a meeting, prepare an agenda and a presentation and any number of documents. Then you’d have to store and share those documents for further editing, and each version of the document would have to be re-circulated amongst the group for further collaboration.
Even worse than the collaboration was the notification process. Documents were:
Passed around on the proprietary email system using oft-forked threads of e-mail that resulted in out-of-synch document changes. To add insult to injury, the e-mail feedback loop which may or may not have involved revisions was completely out of context of the collaborative activities themselves and required tools that were overkill given the requirements. At the end of the day, collaborating involves a bunch of walled gardens of technology that all too often, are retrofitted to the art of collaboration and that end up being manually integrated. In other words, Sue in the Marketing Department finishes tweaking a new campaign proposal and has to remember to send it to Trevor over in Advertising for his thoughts, and so on.
By combining wikis with RSS, Berlind thinks we could get rid of that frustrating morass of e-mails and versions of documents - facilitating true collaboration:
With wikis, which can notify you when their content is changed via RSS, not only can the collaborators use 95% standard technology (there is no standard wiki markup language, yet), any and all virtual expression of the collaborative activities (new content, revisions to that content, annotations, comments, approvals, etc.) happen in the context of the collaborative environment. It’s all in the same one — one that involves almost no proprietary parts.There’s no jumping back and forth between systems or even integration of multiple systems. No word processor. No special content management system. No e-mail. No strapped-on transfer stations to get it all working together.
It looks as if software developers are catching on. Microsoft is reportedly adding wiki functionality to its SharePoint program, and the head honcho of IBM’s collaborative software division recently called the old system of collaboration “fundamentally flawed.”
But how fast will Corporate America embrace these new technologies for collaboration? Human beings are astonishingly resistant to change, even if that change is overwhelmingly positive. As Berlind admits, the use of wikis and RSS to facilitate internal corporate communication is a giant threat to the status quo.
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