At e-week you'll find an enlightening article on the benefits of using RSS instead of email for efficient communication especially within a business context.
RSS Offers Relief from Enterprise E-Mail Overload: 'Even though it's a consumer-driven technology, it may have more benefit for a company than for an individual user. It helps streamline existing forms of communication, so a company will see benefit right away,' said Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research. 'It can mean more efficient use of e-mail. It's geared toward timeliness and what needs more, or less, attention. RSS can really drive benefit that way.'
A long-time favorite topic of mine is visibility as a central means of efficient communication and knowledge sharing. While email accelerates the distribution of information it - by the same token - not only fills your inbox rapidly it also obfuscates itself. Items in your inbox do not provide context and/or a place to make sense of information.
Having that said I think it's necessary to state that e-mail will be with us for a long time. And that it still is an excellent business tool - but and that's for sure we are heading into a different paradigm. A paradigm that makes usage of different web-based communications tools like: wikis, weblogs, aso.
RSS itself could run into the same risks if it is just another IMAP-folder in your e-mail software - although by using RSS you can get rid of spam. The very value of RSS is recognizable if you use this webservice as a tool to make data and information visible - be it on your intranet or on your website. The moment data starts wandering and doing that visibly we will have a place to gather and communicate.
Metainfo:
factID: 278943.1; Publiziert am 19 Jan. 2007 11:04
