A geekie side-trip

If you’ve fooled around with blogging you’ve seen the acronym RSS (really simple syndication). It’s a way of making chunks of what you’ve posted or podcasted available so people who want to pick them up with a news aggregator can get them (ie, "subscribe"). The e-mail "digest" for FISpace–coming out later today, I promise–is really a collection RSS feeds from the site aggregated in FeedDemon and then pasted into Lotus Notes.

For you interested in the bigger implications of RSS, I ran across an article this morning that caught my attention. Here’s what an investment analyst has to say about RSS:

He thinks developers will leverage RSS into enterprise
products. How? Well, an RSS platform can help employees collaborate on projects.
It could even help with collaboration with alliance partners and
suppliers.

He also thinks RSS will result
in the emergence of thriving online communities. For example, a community of
cancer specialists can use RSS to share their findings. No doubt, the growth
from communities can be staggering, as seen with the success with MySpace.com, a
social networking site catering to young music fans.

I added the underlining. But those of you interested in future online community building, time to get your wheels spinning.