Does this sound like you?:
"While technical countermeasures do a passable job
of blocking spam and phishing attacks from beyond the firewall,
the sheer volume of E-mail from legitimate senders has companies
looking for ways to communicate through the clutter. “People
get a lot of what we’ll call occupational spam, where there’s
information that may be delivered to you every day, but you
can have too much of it,” says Michael Pusateri, VP of engineering
with the Disney ABC Cable Networks Group."
My new favorite phrase du jour—"occupational spam"—is
all too familiar: The all-hands inquiries and announcements,
the administrivia, the alerts about things you neither give a
damn about or could do anything to affect if you did.
So just consider it another component of the everyday friction
brought to us by technology?
Actually, enlightened companies are realizing there’s an alternative: According
to Information
Week, it’s RSS. The advantages?
- Email is pushed to you unbidden; with RSS, you only get
what you have opted to subscribe to. - RSS feeds are inherently categorized (one firm set up a
"30 days past due" receivables feed for the accounting department,
e.g.—contrast that to getting one separate email for
each past-due account, scattered randomly throughout your
inbox). - A tremendous number of feeds can be scanned at once from
a single screen. - Because RSS was designed to follow the "headline plus story"
format, it’s inherently an efficient conveyor of meaning—what
you want to read more about vs. what you don’t.
And we’re not done. RSS is also agnostic (or should
that be, "promiscuous"?) about what’s moving through the feed:
"RSS also has this perk for business environments:
It handles a variety of data types, not just news articles.
Words and numbers, the bulk of most databases, are easily converted
into XML for transport. Other kinds of data, such as MP3 audio
files, can be included in RSS feeds, too. In essence, RSS can
serve as a lightweight data-integration system."
Firms such as Traction
Software and KnowNow are
beginning to provide "enterprise" RSS tools, but there are other
ways to simply subscribe to RSS feeds, most of them free.
One 1,000-lawyer firm hired a consultant to estimate (conservatively)
the cost of all-hands emails in lost productivity, and the
answer was…..over $125,000 per month. (All-hands emails
are now forbidden at that firm.) And now, with
RSS, you no longer have the excuse of "but there’s no other
way."
