Last night's ''Business Benefits of RSS'' discussion in Cork

I was one of the presenters at last night's IT@Cork Business Benefits of RSS event.  Tom Raftery has posted photos and follow-up information already!

My goal was to outline the Microsoft RSS Platform, as presented last week at Mix06 by the Microsoft RSS team.  Through a variety of innovations across the platform, Microsoft is aspiring to make the subscription model ubiquitous.  RSS is the plumbing, and the Microsoft RSS Platform allows anyone to easily tap into that plumbing.

Best of all, for literally millions of people who will discover the glowing orange icon, all they need to know is "I can subscribe to stuff by clicking where it says 'feeds'."

The next generation of the platform and applications -- including Vista, Internet Explorer 7, Live.com, Gadgets, and Office 2007 -- feature deep RSS integration.  And what's probably even more interesting is how the RSS platform will allow partners to integrate RSS into their applications in ways I surely can't imagine right now.  As my fellow speakers ably demonstrated last night (and Fergus writes about regularly), this RSS thing is about a whole lot more than just blogging!

If you're interested in the RSS platform, head over to the RSS Team's blog.  And subscribe to their feed, naturally. :)