Vendors and RSS Feeds
Christina Pikas writes about talking to vendors about RSS feeds at the Special Libraries Association 2004 Annual Conferece. I also asked a database vendor, whom I choose not to name, about whether they might use RSS. The rep demoing their intranet product looked stunned, admitted immediately she didn’t know anything about RSS (points to her for her honesty), and led me to another rep, whom she guessed might know. Without skipping a beat, the other rep told me how they plan to use RSS to move data out of the database onto an intranet, a variation of what they’re doing now to post content with their intranet publisher. Knowing database vendors are beginning to adopt RSS makes me excited. How long will it be before they’re using feeds to share content with endusers instead of just other Web sites? Some of my coworkers and I have to do set searches every day. It would be much nicer to have those search results come to us in an intelligent fashion, than for us to have to run them.
