That cloud thing in the drawing used to be Business Wire. Now made redundant by machines.

1. The Writer gets an idea.

2. He or she enters it into the authoring tool, saves, it goes to a file, a feed.

3. The authoring software sends an Update ping to the Cloud (which is just a bit of software running on EC2).

4. The Cloud checks to see if anyone is subscribing to the Writer, and finds that indeed the Aggregator is.

5. He updated! says the Cloud to the Aggregator.

6. The aggregator then reads the feed, finds the new stuff and informs the Reader.

All this happened in less than a second!

That’s what they call Real-time.

The illustration and explanation are big news. RSS is no longer just a pull technology. It now has push capabilities.

That means you can distribute market-moving releases via RSS in near real time to all subscribers, be they Joe Investor, Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg or Fidelity — and they all get it at the same time.

That’s kinda what the PR wire services claimed to do but never could actually deliver. Now they’ve been made redundant by a bit of software and a rented Amazon.com server. Serves them right, I say, because they should’ve distributed mandatory releases free of charge a long time ago.

RSSCloud isn’t the only technology that’s transforming RSS into a real-time push technology. There’s also the Google-backed Pubsubhubbub and FriendFeed’s SUP (which is now Facebook’s, I suppose).

It doesn’t matter really which technology prevails, the results are the same. Your RSS/Atom feeds are your newswire and it’s time to give them the attention they deserve. (Don’t be the next Dell)

I hope that Thomson Reuters, Shareholder.com, SNL Financial, Investis and all the other IR website hosts will act quickly to adopt real-time push for their clients’ feeds just like WordPress did at the weekend.