Stop the Presses, Start RSS

Over at MediaReseacher, Tony Obregon Tony Obregon wonders how RSS will affect the future of the newswires.

"No-frills" wire services like PR Web that accept and deliver feeds via RSS will put pressure on BusinessWire, PRNewswire and MarketWire to lower their prices. Nevertheless, marketers looking for the widest possible distribution will continue to use the marquis services, because attracting masses of people to subscribe to JoeBobInc's feed isn't realistic. However, because RSS is so easy to repackage, the door has been thrown open for wire service competitors, especially for niche markets.

From a user perspective, the RSS feeds offered today by these services are rudimentary (I use Google Reader to aggregate them into one location) and should add search features and standardize on the meta tags that enhances the basic categorizations that they offer. For example, I don't care about new hire releases, but product announcements should automatically be at the top of my list.

Moving from proprietary to open standards always lowers prices (good!), fosters more competition (better!), but forces the existing market leaders to adapt (mebbe not so go for them).