RSS for business

Most of the press about RSS feeds has been about how they let you aggregate headlines you want on pages such as MyYahoo, MyMSN, Google's personalized home page, and specialized feed readers. They can, in fact, be a great marketing tool.

Dave Rosenberg, who writes for CNET and contributes to an InfoWorld blog, today alerted me to other RSS opportunities.

It turns out that some Web-based services for applications like SugarCRM, which provides customer relationship management data, and Basecamp, which is for multiparty project management and calendars, use RSS as well. So that's an opportunity to buy a service that uses RSS, which is interesting.

But it also means that you may have an opportunity to use this relatively simple technology to package and repackage information that's behind a wall, for special clients or for those that you wish to charge. Also, it allows you to let others manipulate and input data on the platform. What do you have that you could put in a feed behind a paid wall that folks would be happy to have, or what service surrounding your business is there that people pay to interact with?