Re: Evangelizing RSS

[travelers@csi.com]

--- In syndication@y..., Julian Bond <julian@n...> wrote:
> What's in it for the traditional media outlets to publish a public 
RSS
> feed? 

There is a good book called 'Information Rules'. It talks about the 
value of information as a commodity. Check it out.

The marginal cost is distributing digital information approaches zero 
(everybody knows that). So a business model that fights it is 
fighting an uphill battle. When they use banner ads, they are 
fighting it.

All architectures have the same three components in varying degress - 
data, logic and presentation. By using banner ads, you are putting a 
fence around 'presentation'. Shipping RSS (or any XML for that 
matter) sends out the data - your value escapes through the backdoor.
If you bank on the information itself or the logic then you have a 
model that is strengthened the more the information is shared - and 
it costs you nothing to share. For example, Reuters categorizes 
information - that is valuable enough that people will prefer their 
version of information - even at the cost of some cash. Others like 
Google have highly relevant information sorted near the top - the 
information itself is valuable. If you like either information 
source, you have to go back to them because nobody does it better- 
even though the raw 'information' might be available. Hmm, perhaps 
the 'collection' (the group, ordering, filtering, etc.) is the 
something that has the 'proprietary' value.

Other ways to add value via pure information is to make it more 
timely, more relevant, more entertaining, more unique, more 
whatever...

MikeD