I recently suggested that Enterprise blogging and RSS (really simple syndication) could have interesting knowledge management implications. Here is some follow-up.
RSS Goes Corporate in Red Herring (July 18, 2005), spotted at LawLibTech) describes the market for and players in enterprise blogging. The article reports that “enterprises are starting to realize that the strengths of RSS [really simple syndication] are great fits for the corporate environment. Email, web browsers, and databases often fall short when an enterprise wants to send a message to hundreds of thousands of global employees, to measure buzz about its products, to filter industry news for relevancy, or to synchronize employee’s web needs between work, home, and travel use. “ The article lists several companies offering enterprise aggregators. So far, the focus appears to be on providing aggregation features plus some content to the enterprise.
Separately, a blog post NewsGator Enterprise Server in beta! (which Rick Klau pointed me to) describes Newsgator Enterprise Server. According to the post, this product emphasizes managing content for the enterprise and distributing that content efficiently to multiple platforms.
Two comments to my original post provide additional perspective. First, forward-thinking people in the trenches are also considering enterprise RSS. Toby Brown of the Barchives.org blog commented “The Utah Bar has met with a librarian for the State. We have talked about an enterprise aggregator for Utah government. My goal is a government site where lawyers can subscribe to content by subject. We’re still working on the idea, but it will be a while before anything happens.” And second, Lars Ploughman of the mind this blog notes that Rojo provides social tagging for blog entries. Following up to his post, I found on the Rojo site: “Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends.”
These items suggest a still-evolving effort to resolve basic functionality of managing RSS feeds and content at the enterprise level but you can see how a new framework could eventually support added functionality for knowledge management.