You Can't Boil the Ocean - What To Do About RSS

I’ve been meeting with clients the past few weeks to discuss some new projects we’re working on – SharePoint integration, entity extraction, data mining and some concepts for an idea generation tool for bankers. One question I have for customers is what they plan to do about integrating blog content and RSS feeds into their information delivery systems. Surprisingly, only a handful of clients have a serious strategy for this and I often get the question, “What are other people doing?”

The people who have thought about the problem (or opportunity, depending on how you look at it) have looked at a number of possibilities. Some have endorsed a particular RSS reader for their firm; others are looking to rollout Outlook 2007 which does a good job of handling RSS feeds. But this leaves the selection of RSS feeds to each user, which has its problems.

Several firms have looked at recently released products that aggregate almost everything on the web and present it for use by the trading/investment management community. SkyGrid, Monitor 110 and InfoNgen fall into this category. Twice in one day, when talking to customers about these products they said, “You can’t boil the ocean,” in essence saying none of these products are a solution for them. They need something a) less expensive, since they need to provide information to hundreds if not thousands of users and b) with some editorial overlay, because their end-users are not necessarily up on the most authoritative and valuable sources of information on the web. The editorial problem is an ongoing one; feeds and blogs appear and disappear regularly.  So we're looking at ways to tackle this problem and if anyone has ideas we'd be happy to hear from them.

Comments

[Phil]

I’m not sure a conventional reader interface would be the most useful way to incorporate blog content. End users don’t monitor a large body of material proactively, for most it’s probably just the FT and WSJ. The rest is reactive, driven by whatever information or piece of content is needed in that moment, which can change wildly within a week. I don’t see that blogs would be any different and in my mind a reader would accumulate huge volumes of unread posts. It would be more useful if users could filter content by company/industry etc but this quickly leads back to the ocean boiling solutions you mentioned.

Ruling solutions like that out, I think Google Blog Search or equivalent is the type of thing that might help users take the first step towards managing their own feeds. It has an interface everyone understands, it hides all the content until you need it, and the results should have some semblance of relevance or authority that will be hard to beat without serious investment.

What do you think will be the most common use cases? I think of news runs and broker research and both of these are search driven, albeit more structured searches. Is it possible to add structure to blog searches without trying to boil the ocean?

[vel]

what about buzzmetrics type of blog mining tools? Dont they do this already? May be these wont answer that 'editorial outlay' clause...or even costly ! Would like to know your thoughts on such blog mining tools already available in the market.