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

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

By Dominic Jones on September 8, 2009

A picture named schema.gif

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.

via rsscloud.org

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.

Posted via web from IR Web Report in Brief


Dominic Jones

Dominic (bio & disclosures) is IR Web Report‘s founder and an online investor relations consultant. He advises leading public companies and investor relations service providers worldwide on using the web for disclosure, engagement and profile building. You can contact him via the contacts page.

Posted in | Tagged , , , | 1 Response

  • http://derek.abdinor.co.za Derek

    It makes sense, but I think the last mile between user and consumption could be made semantically easier. IMO RSS is not the easiest concept for ppl.

    RSS is the HTTP of today. People outside the bubble hit the hurdle at believing they had to type in H-t-tp-:-/-/. WWW should be the next to go, both are implicit.

    Users should see the orange icon, click it and get the updates straight to their email client, twitter, whatever. They should NEVER see the XML behind it.

    Personally, I’ve ditched RSS readers for twitter, and although I’ve lost some control of what comes out of the firehose, the trickle that comes out is often in context and synthesised.