My Sourceforge Project Feed Subscriptions/RSS for product and company news

http://www.bloglines.com/public/EdTechPost

For what it’s worth, here are the feeds (displayed in the amazing Bloglines public interface) from the course management/authoring tools/eportfolio projects that I follow on Sourceforge…

Doesn’t this seem obvious yet to commercial software companies? RSS feeds for product announcements and company news. No, I don’t think personal desktop aggregators are ubiquitous enough to justify this, but as this bloglines demonstration shows, once it’s in RSS the information it can be re-displayed anywhere on the web, not just in a personal desktop aggregator. If you are a tech support department in a large institution or company, how simple would it be to build a ‘product news’ aggregator page/site for all the products your company supports that both your tech team and even just users could have access to. Start creating some transparency and remove the cloak of secrecy from the software upgrade cycle. Sure, there’s some information, like security updates, that maybe you want to have a second channel like email for, where it’s pushed to someone specifically responsible for doing timely upgrades. But most of the stuff you get from vendors is bumpf, or at least it’s stuff that you don’t want to have to deal with until you want to deal with it. I know the marketing people in the software companies would fear loosing ‘eyeballs’ on their precious announcements, but if people can’t be bothered to read or act on them when aggregatoed and displayed in their own company’s official RSS ‘knowledge base,’ what makes you think dumping them into our email boxes is going to make us more receptive to acting on them? Previously solicited bulk email ain’t a whole lot more welcome in many cases than the unsolicited kind. – SWL