Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Real-time collaboration

Jeff Raikes has a column on Microsoft Office Online about The increasing need for real-time collaboration, but his column does not use the latest Real-time collaboration tool: it does NOT have an RSS feed.

David Berlind on ZDNet's Between the Lines blogged Microsoft’s Information Worker Business group vice president Jeff Raikes had a golden opportunity to prove that he and Microsoft "get it" by joining the ranks of tech executives who blog. Instead, he chose the more anitquated (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Web publishing paradigm to distribute his story about how Microsoft eats its own dog food, and saves a ton of money in the process.

I was stunned to receive the notification from a Microsoft spokesperson regarding "a new Office Online column from Jeff Raikes on real-time collaboration," only to learn that there was no way for me to subscribe to Raikes’ musings via RSS. Instead, I guess I’ll have to remember to check Microsoft’s site on a regular basis for anything new, or wait for the next e-mail. How inefficient!


http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/04/16.html#a9875 blogged Jeff Raikes, where's your RSS feed?

Stowe Boyd blogged Jeff Raikes Fumbles: No RSS For "Column" - A number of people, including Scoble and David Berlind, wag their finger at Microsoft's Jeff Raikes for launching an antique-style web column instead of a blog: and no RSS? Scoble says people like this should be fired.

I agree with them. If anyone is going to write a regular column, it should have an RSS feed, so that people can quickly check to see what they have written about, and make the decision whether they want to read it or not. Particularly since this column is about "Real-time collaboration", but it omits the strongest tool for real-time collaboration.

bmw posted a very useful reply on ZDNet: I know this isn't the point (:-), but you can use the Wotzwot HTML-to-RSS scraper service to create your own feed in cases like these. I have create two such "scrape-feeds" for myself and they work perfectly

No comments: