Content Matters

Though most users still don't have any idea what RSS means, underneath the covers RSS is taking hold within many applications they use.  My.yahoo is now RSS-based and the new IE7 and Windows Vista will leverage RSS as the primary means of pushing content to users.

Whether or not the term RSS gains prominence, its ubiquity is not really in question.  RSS is the protocol that will be used more and more for distribution of information inside the enterprise and among publishers and their users.

One company seems well-positioned to reap the benefits of widespread RSS adoption.  While there are many web and software-based clients for RSS, most of them are geared to the individual desktop.  The one company which is focusing its efforts on RSS for the enterprise is Newsgator.

Newsgator has an RSS Platform and suite of products geared to three audiences:
1. End-users: products like FeedDemon, a software-based reader, NetNewsWire, a Mac-based client, and Newsgator Inbox, which lets you use Microsoft Outlook as your RSS client.
2. Enterprise customers, with the NewsGator Enterprise Server.
3. Private label clients seeking to use RSS to distribute content to customers.

While RSS readers are becoming a commodity, Newsgator offers the advantage that all of its readers - for the Web, the desktop and mobile devices - are integrated, so if you've read something on one device, it will be marked as read in another.

Newsgator Enterprise Server is an infrastructure product geared towards helping the enterprise manage vast numbers of feeds coming in from the outside and being distributed within an organization.  Part of the value proposition is simply helping organizations manage bandwidth, to avoid the types of problems that early push applications like PointCast created.  If you have 1,000 users who subscribe to a specific Wall Street Journal feed, for example, you can bring that feed in once to the server, rather than having a thousand users pulling it directly to their desktops.  As companies continue to move away from installed desktop applications, a server-based model works well.

The Enterprise Server can also be used to centrally manage blacklists and whitelists, to manage access credentials, to block undesirable URLs and to restrict access outside the firewall.  Version 1.3 of the Newsgator server, just released, adds new features such as "clippings", the ability to drop articles into a folder which users may subscribe to, the ability to forward any email to an RSS feed, "smart feeds" (persistent keyword searches) and more.

The early adopters of Newsgator Enterprise have come from a number of industries.  Early adopter firms like Edelman Public Relations and executive search firm Spencer Stuart have been among the first on board.  According to Newsgator Director of Product Marketing Todd Berkowitz, they are seeing strong interest from pharmaceutical companies, law firms and others.  Applications include use of external content for sales, marketing and competitive intelligence, as well as internal efforts from corporation communications, human resources and product development.

Newsgator has also signed up some impressive clients for its private label services.  The A beta version of My USAToday, driven by Newsgator allows users to construct a home page combining content from USAToday and external sources.  Similarly, My Newsweek is a syndicated service hosted by Newsgator, featuring feeds by columnists as well as feeds for hot topics and latest buzz.

What's coming next for Newsgator?  According to Berkowitz, some of the items on the development roadmap include support for tagging, improved filtering and relevance and integration with other desktop clients.

What's the impact for publishers?
As I've posted previously, it's pretty clear that RSS is coming and coming fast.  It may get a cooler name (Microsoft and Feedburner seem to have adopted the term WebFeed), but that little orange logo will be driving virtually all applications that push content.  If you haven't begun to establish an XML strategy, it's time to start now.  While content providers with strong technology resources may wish to develop their own solutions, those who prefer to outsource may want to look at private label solutions from companies like Newsgator.

Google has announced a beta of a web-based spreadsheet.

The new application, to be launched under the Google Labs platform, will be released Tuesday to a select group of users who sign up here.  The spreadsheet is an outgrowth of an Excel conversion tool which Google acquired last year in its acquisition of 2Web Technologies. 

This follows on the heels of Google's acquisition of web-based word processor Writely and the release of Google Calendar.  All Google has to do next is acquire S5 or Thumbstacks, as a hosted competitor to PowerPoint, and they'll have an ASP competitor to Microsoft Office.

According to Google Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle, the product is being positioned as a workgroup application, enabling users to more easily share data in a collaborative environment.  Rochelle indicated that they were also exploring the interest level in using Google Spreadsheets as a front-end for Googlebase.

While this product clearly won't be a threat to Excel for true number-crunchers or enterprise installations, there's definitely room for a new entrant in the spreadsheet market.  Spreadsheets are used for many purposes beyond financials - everything from the office phone list to simple project task lists.  Those types of tasks, really simple database projects, would be a natural fit for a collaborative spreadsheet application.

UPDATE: Dan Farber at ZDNet does a better job than I did at describing the different tasks that Google Spreadsheets is trying to solve, as compared to Excel, and how StarOffice and other web-based spreadsheet tools may feel the heat first.

According to Christina Quarles, analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, Google Spreadsheets will help Google expand in markets outside the U.S., where the concept of a bundled copy of MS Office is not as entrenched as it is in the U.S.

Topix.net appears to be offering free local classifieds, in the mode of Craigslist.

When browsing a local city section on Topix.net, a new column of classified ads is displayed in the right column, along with a link to "post your own free ad".  The classifieds can be posted into categories including housing, jobs, for sale, services, events and local shops.  For example, the topix page for San Francisco includes 2 jobs, 1 for sale and 5 services ads.  You can see from the two-level deep taxonomy the types of ads they are seeking.

The service seems to have been rolled out very quietly in early May.  As such, there are just a handful of listings so far (8 for San Francisco, 11 for San Jose and 22 for NYC).  It seems that the Topix team may be test-marketing the concept before an official launch.

As Steve Rubel points out, it's interesting that Topix, a joint venture between the three large newspaper chains, Gannett, Tribune and Knight Ridder, would go into the free classifieds business.  As I've posted previously, Craigslist is putting huge pressure on the traditional classifieds business.  Perhaps these three are willing to try to cannibalize their own classified business rather than allowing Craigslist to do it to them.  If so, kudos to them for the effort, although they'll have to put the weight of their local brands behind the effort to close the huge gap with Craigslist. 

One interesting differentiator is that Topix is bringing the power of social software to these classifieds.  They provide the ability for users to add comments to the classifieds, or to flag an ad as being offensive or inappropriate. 

Topix.net and Craigslist are both on the 50 Content Companies that Matter list.  It will be interesting to see how these two innovators position themselves in the classified advertising market.

Thanks to Guillaume Du Gardier (via Steve Rubel) for noting a few new visualization technologies focused on mapping the social networks of blogs.

I'm a huge fan of visualization tools, particularly for social networking and similar applications.  Tools like i2 Analyst Notebook and ClearForest's ClearResearch provide insights into huge volumes of information for the professional user.  Grokker and Vivisimo provide similar benefits in the web search world.  The tools Rubel shows are not at that level, but each does an interesting job of showing the network of links around a given blog or website.

Of the two, Touchgraph is the more useful one.  Links between sites are color-coded to make it easy to see inbound or outbound links.

More visually appealing, but with less functionality, is this map by Sala Aharef's Websites as Graphs.  It helps you see the density of a network, with color-coded indications of links, images and more, but is not very navigable.

As users struggle to deal with information overload, data visualization will start to take hold among mainstream users.   In the meantime, we can admire the creativity of the early offerings.