An Intranet Powered by RSS

Over at ZDNet, David Berlind has some interesting thoughts on Web 2.0’s impact on collaboration behind the firewall:

So, after reading LaMonica’s story and reading about how Microsoft is adding wiki functionality to Sharepoint and how an IBM executive — the top guy at the company’s collaborative software division — is saying that the existing way of doing things is “fundamentally flawed,” I see companies that understand the extent to which RSS, wikis, and blogs can be extremely disruptive to the status quo.  A status quo that’s largely been upheld by them.  I see the new intranet, the new protocol of which is RSS.

This make tons of sense. What are intranets generally for? Collecting and redistributing knowledge.

Enterprise applications are increasingly becoming RSS enabled, so they can spit out useful feeds from the back end. On the other end, of course, the Web’s information sources  increasingly push out RSS.

Plus, it’s a great way to introduce RSS to skeptical or technophobic staff within your organization. If you make it part of their job to work with RSS, they’ll learn to love it.