Steve Outing of Editor and Publisher has come out strong in support of RSS as a viable adjunct for business publishing online:

E-mail has been hurt by out-of-control spam and the spam-filter "false-positive" issue, but that does NOT mean it's dying as a publishing medium (though there are industry pundits who believe e-mail is doomed). Far from it. Any news publisher who wants to thrive should be publishing content via e-mail and RSS.

The column goes on to describe some outdated objections to RSS, but also covers two innovative Canadian-based projects to integrate RSS feeds into the desktop, one as a general alert box, the other as a toolbar extension for the Microsoft browser, but what Steve neglects to mention is how RSS is an immediate publishing channel, a means to get your message to your audience now.

Regular readers of this site already know the drill: You drag and drop the XML chicklet from our sidebar into any one of many RSS aggregators (ugly name, true) and voilà every time we publish a story, the headline link pops to the fore in your news lists. In truth, it's not quite immediate, but only as immediate as the frequency your software _polls our feed, but the magic of RSS is not in the XML or in the simple summary of the site, but in a little-understood protocol of HTTP called If-Modified-Since where, if nothing has been added since your last check, our webserver will return a special no changes message, resulting in a significant savings in bandwidth.

And it gets better: Because readers only fetch the summary when it changes and when they get the headlines, they will only fetch the news items that interest them, there is no need to broadcast the full list of 'front page' items to every subscriber: Each subscriber reads through the list of headlines and excerpts, and need only download the items they find relevent to their needs. We save publishing costs, they conserve their limited inbound bandwidth costs, and everybody wins.

So why don't more sites offer RSS? Why, among all the mainstream news outlets in Canada, approximately none of them bother to offer RSS? (including Editor and Publisher) Even among those who do, even our top tier researchers like Industry Canada's education research think-tank, how many of them understand RSS enough to ping somebody? Zip.

Even the ever cost-conscious CBC cannot grok RSS.

How could this happen here?

I hesitate to say it's because Canada is a backward nation, but in terms of IT and especially web technologies, one only has to survey any random sample of commercial websites to see whether or not our country leads the global pack, or if we are still stuck in PDF brochure mindsets of corporate doubletalk thrust through a mid-nineties vintage tin-can broadcast and spam advertising model. How this can happen may be through our national penchant to hire the low-bidders, gathering our technical leads from among people who don't actually use this technology themselves, and while there are stellar exceptions, we all know this web-naive case is the norm: Canadian business just doesn't take the web seriously.

Over the ginger and paultry steps they have taken into the Great Online, these same companies no doubt shake their heads over their escalating bandwidth costs and the diminishing returns of their online projects, and while they conclude this Internet thing is just a hoax and passing fad, Europe, Asia and even the United States is walking away with our share of the pie.

[ Source: Startups Offer Online Publishing Alternatives ]