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bob wyman

Thanks for the mention – really appreciate that you’ve kept up on us. To provide more clarity, we have two business units – MyST Blogsite and MyST Enterprise RSS Services. Sometimes clients use both of these offereings. Ironically, all of Intel’s public facing RSS feeds (http://rss.intel.com), with the exception of their blog, are driven by the MyST platform.

Ryan -

“I think a behind-the-firewall blogging and feed-reader platform has a bright future.”

I agree – we’ve seen a serious leap in blogging-inward requests and MyST Blogsite was initially developed for this anticipated demand. Somewhere along the path to success the market said they wanted advertorial blogsites
first. However, the interest in knowledge-blogging is growing.

Jökull –

“Doesn’t Wordpress already support RSS feeds?”

Yes it does, but you have to consider the numerous use cases for RSS – a blog tool (like Wordpress) requires a proxy object (i.e., a blog post for its own RSS items to point to. This doesn’t meet all RSS business requirements – imagine forcing content managers to write a blog post just to add a pre-existing content item (such as a discrete web page about a product) to a feed.

Other business requirements that Wordpress cannot handle include cases where a web page that changes from time-to-time must be updated to a feed. Imagine you have a page that carries all of the specifications of an Intel chip. Further consider that the title and description of the chip may never change, but attributes of the product do. As a content manager, you want that page to surface from time -to-time in the feed when certain attributes of the page cange – for example when the speed of the chip increases. This necessitates content change triggers that cause the item to be added to the feed.

Are there any good open source (free) web-based aggregators (like Bloglines, Newsgator online, KnowNow, Attensa Feed Server, etc.) that can be deployed behind the firewall?