It is a muggy, cloudy summer day here in the woods west of
Boston. This afternoon I invested some time Google searching.
Here are
direct screen copies of selected Google search results, July 17, 2005.
Even as a true believer in RSS, I was astounded:
Results 1 – 10 of about 9,540,000 for rss investment. (0.50 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 10 of about 4,310,000 for rss investors. (0.37 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 10 of about 19,700 for “rss community“. (0.25 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 10 of about 15,500 for “rss investment“. (0.30 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 10 of about 10,700 for “rss ecosystem“. (0.08 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 10 of about 10,500 for “rss investors”. (0.10 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 10 of about 7,320 for “rss space“. (0.06 seconds) [try it]
Results 1 – 10 of about 307,000,000 for “”rss”“. (0.08 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 10 of about 69,300,000 for “rss feeds“. (0.42 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Since launching the RSS Investors fund, a number of insightful people (perhaps first, Paul Kedrosky) have
asked how we can expect to make a contribution investing in such a
narrow space. Our answer (and that of others, such as Tom Foremski in a lead article that stimulated the Kedrosky critique, and in a reply
to Paul) is that we are investing in much more than a standard (RSS
writ small). We are investing in a space that is defined by the RSS approach to
solutions,
services, companies, and innovation.
We think the RSS space is
already huge and has almost unimaginable potential. The reality is not that we are big and
the space is too small. Relative to the space, we are small, and
the RSS community is large,
inclusive, and growing, and the RSS investment space is
vast and expanding. We think we have plenty to work on!
We didn’t name this investment space–the RSS community did. Here again are
results from Google, pulled this afternoon, that show the
relevant comparison between the exact phrase “RSS investment” and two
possible alternatives, one more specific and almost completely unknown
to the general public (”Atom investment”) and one more vague but also
more general (”Web 2.0 investment”). Neither of the
alternatives have gained any traction. The results
are striking and impossible to dismiss:
Results 1 – 10 of about 15,500 for “rss investment“. (0.30 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 5 of about 7 for “atom investment“. (0.24 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
Results 1 – 1 of about 5 for “web 2.0 investment“. (0.10 seconds) [try it] [see archived version]
The RSS community has been heralding its own relevance to investors for several years. What is amazing is how long it took for
investors to listen. For example, two years ago, June 23, 2003, in Tig’s Corner, Rahul wrote a prescient post. Here is an excerpt:
Tim Bray has been writing about RSS [1 2 3].
He gives some examples about how RSS can be leveraged for banking,
sales tracking and weather, and also discusses the potential pitfalls.
I have been writing for some time about how RSS could be a
disruptive innovation going beyond blogs, with a specific focus on
enterprise events. (See my post on Information Refinery
from last July.) Thats where the focus should be. In fact, for all
practical purposes, the actual weblog pages are useless for me – I only
need the RSS to flow into my Info Aggregator.
I don’t need to access the blog pages to read what people are writing.
The RSS ecosystem is going to be more important than the blogging
ecosystem. Blogs will become by-products of the RSS ecosystem. Wait a while and we will make some RSS magic happen!
There is an old adage in venture capital, that we always overestimate
what will happen in the next 6 months, and underestimate what will
happen in the next six years. Well, this is the case with the RSS
approach.
Welcome to the party! The RSS ecosystem is a full-fledged
worldwide center of innovation. The RSS ecosystem
is comprised of entrepreneurs and activists daily inventing new ideas,
applications and communities, processes, services, systems and
components. Current accomplishments of RSS entrepreneurs and activists include podcasting,
a profound influence on Microsoft’s next operating system, Longhorn,
and the spread of the OPML standard for sharing outlines and thus knowledge.
RSS syndication has turned the BBC and Boston.com (from the Boston Globe, where 42 columnists including prize-winning author James Carroll have their own feeds) and a host of other news
outlets into global content services open to all. Sidelight: RSS has enabled both the People’s Daily–the official news outlet of the Communist Party in China–and Ohmynews.com, a Korean-based citizen-contributor news service–to reach global audiences. And these are
only a few of the current accomplishments. In short, the RSS
ecosystem is a vibrant “space” for RSS
investment and RSS investors.
The keystone species of the RSS ecosystem, the
Web Superservices, are disruptive innovations invading and colonizing (in the biological sense) the core businesses of other business
ecosystems. To note just one example, Yahoo is now the world’s
largest news aggregator (see for example, Brian Livingston on this topic). If
you don’t think Yahoo is a threat to the traditional news business, ask
almost any senior executive of almost any of those organizations. And stories on last week’s London bombings showed the power of bloggers and citizen journalism. See Brian Braiker’s excellent summary “History’s New First Draft” on MSNBC of the ecology of newsgathering that emerged around the bombings, as well Adam Penenberg’s story in Wired on Michael Powell using superservice Technorati to keep track of blog stories.
