Moving the Mouse by RSS
: At an ETech session on moving content via RSS on Disney, they say that Dave Winer and Adam Curry suggested the architecture that allows them to give users full-quality, instant-on video on the home pages of ESPN and other sites. If you go to a Disney site and want this video, you’ll end up downloading a tiny ap (Windows only) that is actually an RSS aggregator that takes enclosures of the video material to cache on users’ hard drives.
Nice technology, nice use, nice gestating of big-media technology in nanomedia.
: They’ve shipped more than 500 million videos with this technology.
: Disney is now talking about how they migrated TV production “shift logs” to Movable Type. They didn’t tell anybody it was a “blog.” And the staff called them geniuses. “Hmmm, what else can we steal from the blogosphere,” they said. Next: They use RSS to distribute internal information via NewsGator and Outlook. “They don’t even know it’s not email. It just shows up and they’re happy.”
They’re looking to replace RSS with Atom because it’s more two-directional. (I don’t know what that means. I report; you understand.)
: Conclusion: “RSS and weblog software are very useful to business and it doesn’t have anything to do with anybody’s opinions.”