You may have to trust my judgment on this one, but Andy Seidl’s post called RSS Adoption Train-Next Stop: Mainstream may well be the most important blog post you’ll read this year.
I make no secret of my admiration for the work that the people at MyST Technology are doing. I also put two long phone calls I had with Bill French in a steadily-growing list of amazing conversations I’ve had about the path of future technology developments this year. You’ll notice that Bill’s note to Andy is the inspiration for Andy’s post.
The core of the post is here:
“RSS is a disruptive force. It is changing the way people connect with information. I’ve long believed that the ultimate search technology is one you don’t explicitly use. Imagine turning the search paradigm on its head-instead of us finding stuff, why not stuff finding us? Pushing this idea to the extreme, our applications would understand what we are working on and automatically provide us with exactly the information that we need in every specific context. In that scenario, we would never need to search for stuff because the right stuff would find us.
This is the direction we’re headed. We have a long way to go, but technologies like topic maps, smart tags, research services, and yes, RSS, are all bringing us closer.”
The key message of the post is here:
“But this train is already moving fast and picking up speed every day. Many B2B and B2C value chains are already leveraging RSS to reduce time-to-awareness, capture precious attention cycles, avoid spam-related issues, increase search engine visibility, create a branded desktop presence, and so on.
All aboard!”
But there is so much in this short post that it is impossible to do it justice. You gotta read it, man! Even if you don’t understand this post or see it with the same enthusiasm that I do, be sure to keep a copy of it, remind yourself to go back to it once a month, and, even if it takes a while, there will come a day, when the lucidity of this post will flash in front of your eyes and you might even say, darn it, Dennis was on to something before the rest of us even saw it coming – no wonder he kept talking about that train thing.