More on the MSCOM RSS Experience

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:36:39 GMT

A very thoughtful response from David Brunelle on my response to his post regarding the RSS Directory... And I agree wholly that we need our critics and we need an open dialogue with customers about the things we do. This is part and parcel to doing business these days, and has to be "in our DNA" if we're to be a true communities team.

Without going into any detail, let me list out a few of the ideas we've got for improving the RSS experience on MSCOM in the context of the directory and more broadly:

Make OPML available for any category or grouping of feeds in the directory
Add to the directory social bookmarking features, including alternative navigation metaphors based on tagging--e.g., tag clouds and the like. Essentially, we'd step away from formal controlled vocab, taxonomy-based categorization schemes and step into the world of folksonomy. The question we will have to resolve is how to reconcile the two; perhaps the latter would completely supersede the former.
Implement tagging and user recognition controls across the network as well as on participating third-party community (and possibly partner) sites.
Give customers the ability to create their own feeds and OPML collections of Microsoft-related resources, based on their and others' tags.

There are still other, bigger ideas on the table, and developments in the works for Microsoft.com in particular, but it's too soon yet to start making any statements about what will or won't take shape. Good and talented people are thinking about and working on the customer experience here at MSCOM and these things just take time. We're also all too aware how, especially in the world of the Web where things evolve so quickly and irrelevance lies just around the corner, "time is the fire in which we burn."

As always, comments/ideas welcome.

The Strategic Importance of RSS

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 17:32:33 GMT

Recently I started participating in a v-team ("virtual team" for those not in the know on Microsoft jargon--or is this an industry-wide standard? Nevermind. Don't answer that.) on our cross-group if not wholly corporate need for a more unified, standardized approach to RSS on MSCOM. Ironically enough, this is the very problem I set out to address some 2 years ago when I first started working on the Communities team, but I'd say, between you and me, despite the best of intentions--and the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I'm told--we may have only added to the customer aggravation on this point. Oh, sure, putting out a central RSS directory has good customer value, and I'm glad for that. But it's a long way from there to providing a coherent and user-friendly set of solutions for RSS feed creation and delivery across the network. My ambitions haven't quite yet panned out. Oh well, I'll get over it. ;-}

Anyway, so about this v-team I mentioned. It's hard to say whether a group of us representing MSCOM RSS interests from around the Microsoft globe will be able to solve this problem any time soon, but just getting together and talking about the problems and opportunities that face us in the RSS space has value in itself. One of our goals is certainly to arrive at a common understanding of what's needed for the network to make progress with its RSS infrastructure and customer experiences, and I think that starts with some fundamentals about the value of RSS to a company like Microsoft.

Klaus, a rep from the German subsidiary, proposed this list of value props for RSS--basically, why it's important to Microsoft, in particular in the context of MSCOM (I present his text here unedited, pasted straight from his mail to our v-team alias):

RSS is a strategic movement. It builds the foundation for innovative ways of communication (PodCast, Blogs, viral Marketing)
RSS and Blogs together will enable us to reach business customers with a minimum of investments
RSS is the ideal technology to establish content distribution to either other sites on ms.com, sites owned by Microsoft Partners and at least sites whose are totally external (e.G. Ford or Citibank)
RSS is the easiest way to increase your reach if you don’t have enough budgets. A RSS-Feed works as a multiplicator. Use Google to check which sites are referring to an rss-feed. 763 results for the security bulletin (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/secrss.aspx%22) is a clear statement!
RSS is state of the art – WE CAN’T WAIT ANY LONGER
The competitors in the market have already adopted the technology (look at: http://www.ibm.com/news/us/en/index_podcast.rss)
The customers are expecting to see new technologies on our web-pages
Finally, it is also a matter of image ;-)

I think that's a pretty good start, and is a solid response to those who hesitate to embrace RSS because of their understandable concern over the difficulty of measuring the impact of the technology--here I'm talking metrics and reporting on RSS feed consumption. While metrics and reporting on RSS is needed, it's also a complex problem because of the very nature of the distributed medium. I've definitely banged my head against that wall for some time, but in the end it was clear to me that providing RSS is the first and best good; measuring it for business impact can only be secondary to that.

o brave new world: RSS

More on the MSCOM RSS Experience

The Strategic Importance of RSS