Thursday, May 28, 2015

Is RSS making a come back?

Just when it seemed RSS  had gone the way of other promising technical developments and headed into oblivion, it seems to be enjoying a revival.

Or perhaps it never really went away. We have been using RSS for at least 10 years for news feeds - maybe longer - and required an RSS Reader which few could bother with loading, but when built into browsers became easier to use. Why RSS? Basically as a news feed from our Virtual News Offices to provide headline news flashes. OK - lets step back ten years or so. With self publication the "news" available has become a torrent - the problem how to keep in touch with the information you need and not sink beneath this torrent of content, little of which is actually of interest.

At the time we figured that many people typically would want to monitor news streams from various sources and RSS offered the opportunity to create their own customised headline service. For example news from their professional world - new technologies, product introductions, industry news  etc. Then news from about their special interests - sport and their favourite team, music, entertainment etc. General news of events, politics, weather and finally social news from their friends and relatives. RSS  offered the opportunity to collate headlines from all these sources, quickly scan them and follow up those of most interest and ignore the rest.

The BBC  offers a good description of RSS, Facebook offers an RSS option too, but the RSS button seems to have gone from a lot of company web sites if it was ever there at all. In today's content overload, perhaps they are missing a trick in not offering an RSS news feed.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Small office, home office, no office

With 5 million UK small businesses, there are more and more people working outside of traditional offices.

What was once called the SOHO - small office, home office sector was still a dedicated space in a home, or shed, but today for many workers the office is actually an iBook or lap top plus iPhone. The home office has its problems - typically other residents scheduling deliveries for example. Very disruptive to concentration to break off and deal with someone's Amazon shipment, often a neighbour's as the delivery guys have figured out people working from home. So it was time to road test the iBook office.

There was a fair amount of planning to ensure communications would be as smooth as possible, starting with organising an Internet connection in Spain. Checking on to the Ryanair flight at Luton with a bar code on my iPhone - printed documents were not required any more than I needed a printer. I did back up all my client files on a portable drive and that was it to run the business offshore for three weeks.

The age of the NO - No Office - is here!