So, I’m watching the videos from the channel9 team at Microsoft talking about Longhorn, IE7 and RSS.
If you’ve used Safari or Firefox to view RSS, there’s no suprises in the way IE7 handles RSS…except that it opens up RSS storage to the rest of Window’s apps.
Which is bloody interesting, and I see what Dave Winer was talking about last week – this is a huge deal in terms of embedded usage and corporate adoption of RSS…small pieces loosely joined anyone?
The demo (about 25 mins in) shows one of the RSS team using the enclosures tag to suck in an *.ics file from an events page…and then suck that into Outlook…and then apologise to all his ‘friends’ on the Outlook team as he realises he’s just demoed the future demise of Exchange Server…funny, but incredibly cool.
And all this looks just like Userland’s (Winer’s old company) Radio desktop blog/aggregator software which was supporting enclosures and doing all this stuff (minus the glue) oooh, 4 years ago?
Still, blogging just became far more than writing – it’s a publishing mechanism in the broadest sense…it really does flatten the landscape and hierarchy of corporations – each employee will be a free agent of some level, armed with a publishing tool that just *flows* rss and enclosures…and reads…no more centralised services, just distributed, lightweight and cheap web servers and tools…
and no IT department and no Exchange server…just people empowered with individual tools…that make smart use of distributed data (swearing removed :-)
One hiccup? building some sort of robust authentication into RSS – critical, particularly if data is going to be distributed in spite of the corporate firewall.