Bill French, co-founder of MyST Technology Partners just sent me an email referencing my recent article covering good examples of RSS newsmastering applications and where he gently shows me their progress as validation of the emerging NewsMater role.

Bill French writes:

"This Edu RSS item caught my attention because we have about a dozen such NewsMastering applications running for [paying] customers.

I think we’re the market leader in enterprise-level NewsMastering services, but we haven’t really comprehended how far we’ve come with this idea, or necessarily associated the activity with NewsMastering.

Each of the examples listed below is performing in much the same way that Edu RSS does.

Gathering and re-aggregating is largely automated because we’re dealing with known sets of information objects that predictably “belong” in some sort of feed.

However, we also support manual sharing of items from a feed to another channel for feed production, and in some cases this is occurring in all of these examples.

Here are four applications that seem to be similar:

1) Intel – http://rss.intel.com

For Intel we provide an RSS Management Console where their Web team may create, stage, and test their RSS feeds. Although the process of maintaining their products and press relations feeds is largely automated through MyST Scripting Services, the team uses our platform to test feeds, validate and proof them in a staged feed setting (a requirement of most large firms).

They may also collaborate about the feeds using an internal corporate blogging framework.

The surrounding MyST Weblog and knowledge management services also provide a knowledge base about their syndication activities – a lean [secure] project management space is the best way to describe it.

Because Intel has a fair number of employee changes, the space has already proven itself as a persistent knowledge store for historical strategies and decisions made by the team.

2) Microsoft MSDN Regional Director Blogs SmartSpace™

In this project we harvest the blog content of all 50 Microsoft Regional Directors hourly. The objective for doing so provides a unified search model for Microsoft Office Research Services and smart tags. So, users may subscribe to the MSDN/RD research service and access all the blog content as a discrete information source.

As I was typing this message, I highlighted the term “indigo” and performed an immediate lookup for that term across all recent (and historical) blog posts.

3) University of Michigan Business School

For this university we created a SmartSpace™ - a space where 40+ student [classroom] blogs are aggregated so that the professor can easily monitor the information, comment on certain posts in a highly productive manner, and generally get a feel for what the class is experiencing as they perform their research projects about databases.

The students also use the SmartSpace™ to easily review what other students are experiencing. They call it – “The Learning Blogosphere”, but it also has secure collaborative properties. For example, credentialed members may create comments in the SmartSpace™ that are not visible on the public posts. This is a model that allows the professor to create a secure plane of knowledge between public posts. By using these various services, he is able to create a master news feed that that entire class monitors.

He may also create and manage any number of additional feeds for reporting class activities to other faculty members, news gathering processes at the University of Michigan and elsewhere.

Secondarily, this SmartSpace™ provides the professor with new types of views achievable by integrating research tools like Grokker.

4) NetHawk Interactive Market Syndication Services – (only a screenshot of this application can be shown)

In this application we use MyST’s Market Syndication Services platform to provide an RSS management facility that allows NetHawk to produce an extensive array of RSS feeds by simply tuning queries against client Web sites or other Internet resources and sites.

Market Syndication Services has been dubbed the “RSS factory” and provides a highly productive way to create RSS feeds from almost any source of content.

The management console in Market Syndication Services is very much like the consoles in use by Intel and other enterprise clients and reflects the role and responsibilities of the NewsMaster.

But Market Syndication Services takes some of the semantic properties of syndication to a new level – the ability to feed-splice and randomize advertising or specific items that should appear in a feed.

You can see the results of this by looking at the http://nethawk.net home page.

Each time you refresh the page, a randomized news feed will syndicate into that page different items. The feeds that this is based on are updated automatically each night through Market Syndication Services."

Excellent feedback indeed and quite a good number of ideas and examples of where we are directed with some of these early applications.

My impression is that we are just scratching the surface of the possibilities and uses we could make of this, but Myst Technologies real-world examples show that NewsMastering is well on its way to become a valuable comptitive asset inside small and large business entities.

What do you think?