Trouble at the Rojo corral

So Rojo has suffered "a catastrophic failure". Which means I am suffering catastrophic RSS withdrawal symptoms. I'm hurting bad, mannnn. I just need one fix to keep me goin'.

I was sitting down for a coffee on Friday with a friend discussing examples of wikis & blogs (the usual) and the subject of RSS came up. He was a bit sniffy about it but for me RSS is critical to social media - inside & outside the firewall. An organisation can talk about blogs & wikis (B&W - the social media equivalent of T&A) but I know they're serious when they start talking about RSS.

Why? Because RSS holds this stuff together from a user perspective. News items, blogs, podcasts - all these can be delivered to my feedreader - assuming that its working. RSS will surely mutate but its promise is to shift one-to-many traffic away from email to a more manageable environment and leave what should be left for email: one-to-one or few-to-few.

N.B. Doing corporate comms, senior managers would often mistake sending an email for communicating with their staff.
"Look we've sent them an email, job done"
"And what do you do with emails you get from random people?"
"I delete them"
"..."

RSS could drive improved communications inside organisations if you measure how many people actually click through on feeds to the intranet page with your message then you get some idea of how many people have read it. And this sobering news might lead you to realise how few people do.

Of course it could also lead to a dog's breakfast. But the effectiveness of many corporate comms programs resembles the dog's breakfast post-digestion rather than beforehand - so that might be an improvement.