RSS Feeds: Way Too Sexy

My company has banned RSS feeds from all our company media and web sites. To my company, “RSS feed” sounds like “web 2.0″, which sounds like “social media”, which, if accepted, will most assuredly usher in an era of interns posting pictures of their boobs on their company SharePoint profiles.

In their quaking fear, my company has not yet noticed the true power of RSS feeds, which lies in a company’s ability to publish their own announcements to several company web sites or technologies. They think that RSS feeds will be used to stream Reuter’s news — and oh, the scandal. Someone could read a story on Obama’s choice of breakfast drink on our company web site, think we wrote it, and sue us for, uh, talking about the wrong stuff.

I’d like to take a moment to point out that in my former blog, Terrifying Tales from Tech Support, my blog-complaints about stupid, tech-unsavvy users were aimed at young, non-IT-majoring college students. Today my stupid, tech-unsavvy users are IT “professionals” who have worked at my company for years. I’m almost sorry I complained about those poor little philosophy majors, because at least they had the good sense not to enter a career in IT if they didn’t know what a URL is. And in retrospect I think those kids were more tech-savvy than my co-workers.

The following conversations occurred at a recent website redesign meeting. As usual, all the participants are IT people.

Random Asshole Number One: Hey, you know what would be cool? If we had an RSS Feed of our announcements at the top of this site.

Me: Our announcements? What announcements?

My Boss’s Boss: RSS feeds are banned, but I might be able to get them unbanned for this situation if there’s a business need.

Me: But — first things first, what announcements would we be feeding –

Random Asshole Number Two: AN RSS FEED WOULD BE AMAZING!

Me: But, an RSS feed from — ?

Random Asshole Number Three: Holy Crap, an RSS FEED? What an INCREDIBLE IDEA!

Me: But –

Several Random Assholes Chanting Together: RSS FEED! RSS FEED! IT’S WHAT WE NEED! IT WOULD BE A BEAUTIFUL THING!

Me: Ok, but, what announcements would we be feeding?

RA1: Our announcements about outages and stuff.

Me: But those aren’t anywhere to feed from –

RA2: We’d type them in.

RA3: Yes we’d type them in.

Me: So… we’d type them into this site, and then they’d show up on this site, where we typed them?

Everyone: Yes! RSS Feeds! RSS Feeds!

Me: Ok, but that’s not an RSS feed.

RA1: Well, it is if it’s scrolling.

RA2: Yes, that’s what we meant. We want it to scroll.

RA3: Yes, scrolling. That’s what RSS feed means right?

MBB: Right. It means something that scrolls.

Me: Oh, ok. Everyone here thinks that “RSS Feed” = “Thing that scrolls”.

Also, everyone here thinks that “Thing that scrolls” is the hottest thing to hit the World Wide Web since spinning teddy-bear shaped navigation buttons.

That’s good.