Carrying the Lantern

Bill R.: And Steve G.'s article on RSS in 2004...

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1399365,00.asp

Bill R.: The light is starting to come on for me. All this talk about RSS impact. I can begin to see the formation of real ideas for my work. The IBPC newsletter? KB white papers? Hmmm ...

Streaming people: I was thinking about RSS and some thought-provoking recent articles by Steve Gillmor last night. It occurs to me that you can think of the output of some people - writers, bloggers, business colleagues - as a content stream. They write articles, email, business plans, PowerPoint presos (yuk), snap photos, doodle diagrams and leave voice mail.

If all that stuff was captured in an RSS stream, then you could pull up your own custom mix in an aggregator, and maybe publish it somewhere. At that point, you've just done what most major corporations spend heavily on salaries and related infrastructure to accomplish - you've created a 'work product' - and you might be able to accomplish this without buying office buildings, erecting cubicles and paying for heat, light and so forth.

With a blog account somewhere, RSS feeds, an aggregator and judgment, you might be able to produce a higher-level aggregated stream that, at some level, is basically undistinguishable from what happens every day at big corporations.

A more interesting question is, are there useful streams that are already available from the thousands of free RSS feeds that the web offers? By picking and choosing feeds and items carefully, could I produce something at very low cost that a large corporation or other entity would be willing to pay for? I'm not talking about a newsletter or info service, either. I'm going to investigate this a bit more.... [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]