If you’re an RSS junkie like I am, then your second most active program (after the browser) on the desktop is probably some form of RSS aggregator.


When I’m pressed for time - as seems to be most days now, a quick glance over the subscribed feeds in the morning prepares me for the day. My reading is a collection of weblogs and news feeds - much the same as I am sure your RSS aggregator feeds off.


But there is something missing.


Business Data.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now and the advent of the holiday season seems to be a good idea to ask the following questions:

Where is the Travelocity last minute travel feed for my New Years vacation, split into channels per location? See a vacation you like in your aggregator? Click on the link and “buy now”. Yes it’s advertising - but it’s also information I happen to be interested in.

Where is the TOYS’R'US special offer channel for toys (with perhaps a separate channel per interest)?

Even O’Reilly has yet to catch on to what is possible. Why can’t I get this as an RSS feed also? Or monitor new career opportunities from here using my aggregator?

Imagine how up to date the data could be that arrives into your aggregator - and as YOU subscribe, YOU can control what you read and for how long you want to read the feed.

What easier format could there be for businesses to publish business data in? The client side of things is slowly becoming ubiquitous and frameworks like Apache Cocoon make publishing XML easy.Of course there are already lots of XML formats for publishing business data. But RSS is a no-brainer and the infrastructure is already in place.

Aggregating business data into RSS is the next wave. If this takes off (and why shouldn’t it) what’s to stop business software from say SAP from producing RSS feeds out of the box?

Just imagine.

What other RSS-business data would you like to see?