The developers of RSS never dreamed it would be used to syndicate content—notably blogs—when they created it. The original intent was to allow content aggregation in a portal. Created at Netscape for the “My Netwcape Network” portal, the idea was for content providers to offer headline-based feeds that would appear automatically on the portal. Portal users would click on a the link in the portal to go to the article on the publisher’s site.

The fact that RSS moved from a portal utility to a means of syndicating blog content is a case study in the rule of unintended consequences, according to a white paper from Gartner Research. The story is even more intriguing given that a protocol called ICD (Information and Content Exchange) was being developed around the same time to do pretty much the same stuff. ICE had the backing of mainstream business, was proposed to the World Wide Web Consortium, and could be used for a variety of purposes. RSS, on the other hand, was never submitted to any standards body, was encumbered by competing specifications (we can’t even agree on what RSS stands for), and has gone through a number of conflicting versions. And yet RSS came out on top.

Based on the evolution RSS has experienced so far, Gartner sees uses we’re not even thinking of today based on syndication of data instead of blogs: “For example, a credit card company could provide an RSS feed describing the last 10 transactions on a card, forusers who want to monitor accounts for identity theft. An enterprise resource planning application could provide highlights of inventory data to authorized users via an RSS feed.”

In fact, Gartner expects the growth of application-generated RSS data to outpace human-produced RSS content by a factor of two by the end of 2006.

(The four-page report is $95 at Gartner’s Web site).

All of which gets me thinking about how RSS can be used in our business beyond the blog distribution use to which we’re putting it now. Issues monitoring jumps to mind. Amazon.com is producing 200 RSS feeds that report the top 10 products selling in a variety of categories. Might media outlets report the top visits to stories in various categories on their Web sites so we could automtically monitor what people are reading instead of just what’s been published?

If RSS is going to evolve beyond its current state, the PR profession should be thinking about how we can apply it now rather than reacting after new uses have been developed. I’d love to see the comments on this entry fill up with outside-the-box ideas.