To summarise my view, I think search is going to be the platform from which Microsoft will challenge its main rivals in the RSS space. And one of those rivals will be Bloglines/Ask Jeeves. More on that in a momemt...
In an email exchange with someone today I speculated that start.com will give Microsoft an advantage over its traditional rivals Google and Yahoo - at least until Google reveals what it's going to do with its Blogger technology. Or whatever else they are cooking up with Google News and similar customization products. Yahoo is also enhancing its My Yahoo platform by making RSS a key component.
The one player that hasn't been talked about much yet, in this context, is Bloglines/Ask Jeeves. But they are definitely positioning themselves to join in the RSS aggregation/search integration game. Take a look at the new Bloglines homepage - notice anything different? Well it appears that search now gets top billing on the page, ahead of blog reading and subscription. The search box is at the centre-top of the page, the search component of the circular graphic is at the top of the circle, and most of all the introductory statement mentions search first:
"Bloglines is the most comprehensive, integrated service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content. It's free and easy-to-use."
The interesting thing is they don't even mention the word "read" in that paragraph. I also think the word "integrated" is a key...
Now take a look at the Bloglines homepage from a year ago, c/o the wonderful archive.org. It's from January 2004 and this was the introductory paragraph back then:
"Bloglines is a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines."
Notice that the word "search" didn't even rate a mention one year ago. In 2003/04 Bloglines was a service to "keep up with" blogs. Subscription and blog-reading was the focus, not search.
None of this is a great surprise. Ask Jeeves is a search company after all and they bought Bloglines in order to use it. It's natural that Bloglines is being influenced by the coach yelling in the dugouts.
But I think it's more than just Bloglines utilising Jeeves' search strength in its product. It's clear that Bloglines/Ask Jeeves is doing this in order to position itself to take on The Big 3 of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Because RSS Aggregation + Search is going to be a winning strategy when competing in the big leagues.
]]>This idea is in close relation to what Robin Good termed the newsmaster:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/2004/02/19/
the_birth_of_the_newsmaster.htm
Solutions such as reBlog offer a glimpse at the true ability given to subject matter experts to filter and republish content attained through RSS feeds. Aggregate, mix, republish.
http://www.reblog.org/
Of course, there have been discussions about the communal triage of information using mechanisms such as attention.xml, but what is popular is not always what is most important.
However, search mechanisms will certainly be an extremely important tool and a direct focus of many corporate dollars.
]]>