Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

I think this is a very relevant point now that Atom and RSS are becoming more mainstream:

Companies are also looking at RSS as a data integration protocol. After the complexity of SOAP, the industry did try to create something called ICE that has not gotten much traction. The popularity of RSS makes it a possible replacement for ICE. The forever running EDI/Data Integration projects were replaced by EAI, where companies just gave up on integrating and just started putting a pretty face of old applications and data. RSS could push the EAI concept to finally unlock enterprise data.

There are a lot of data publication applications that can be accomplished with feeds and not with complex web services like SOAP.

An added advantage is that there are a lot of tools that can process RSS feeds.

For example podcasting could have probably been done via SOAP. It just doesn’t make sense. Just extend RSS. The cool thing about RSS is that the data model maps to a lot of applications.