Portal and RSS, Save Me from Mount St. Spam!

Here's an updated vision of the "personal publishing" concept from the Web's early days. I think RSS has to be a vital piece in the corporate portal. Here's why:

I get, and send, a lot of email. Here's how a typical 100 incoming emails break out, with a relative value ranking:

(If there's a big gap below, please skip past it. It's my best attempt at pasting an html table into this posting.)

How many	Type of message	Relative value
50	Industry updates, newsletters, and outright spam	2%
15	Personal	10%
25	Functional, work related	80%
10	Other	8%

In the Functional category, at least half is project and process-related documents and memos. These are from managers, leads and co-workers on multiple projects; firm management; and outside development partners, including clients, VARs, and vendors.

When I'm thinking about a specific project-- at a team meeting, say-- I have a pretty comprehensive mental map of the activities, tasks and timeframes of that project. But most of the time, say when I'm looking thru my email inbox, that image gets jumbled in with several other projects, and then with all the other stuff there. Keeping the whole hodge-podge straight takes a big mental toll, and makes all my real work that much harder to manage.
Email is a lousy way to run a business. But it's what most of us do, most of the time. Managing all those cognitive maps in my head is hard enough as it is. Add in the ongoing burden of creating, updating, and maintaining my own personal network of folders, moves, deletions, forwardings, and so on, just to keep track of it all?
Then toss over it a nightly layer of dust and ash spewed by Mount St. Spam? Well, that makes it darn near impossible.

Portal, Save Me!
Okay, so we've moved a lot of that stuff into the corporate portal. We're not all groping in darkness of email anymore, and somebody who's good at organizing things is handling that end.

So where's RSS come in? Good question! I thought I had that in mind at first, but then it turned into a justification for a corporate portal.
The answer, next week.

Cheers,
David