CNET Reports on Increase in RSS Use
CNET News.com published an article yesterday about the dramatic increase in use of RSS content syndication that has taken place as a result of the weblog phenomenon. The title of the article, "Old data update tool gains new converts", is quite misleading, but there are a number of interesting pieces of information in it. For instance:
- newspapers are using RSS to alert readers when they have stories that don't appear in their print editions,
- researchers at Oxford University have used RSS to provide server status updates.
The most interesting quote in the article comes from Ben Hammersley, the author of
Content Syndication with RSS, a soon-to-be-released book from O'Reilly:
RSS is proving to be a nice, robust and easily used tool for moving data...not just news headlines, but everything--from orders and inventory to whether or not the servers are up. Thanks to the tools the RSS development community has made these past few years, it has a great future in the enterprise.