We want RSS everywhere

Here's the BBC coverage of Microsoft's RSS announcement at Gnomedex on Friday.

Microsoft's next version of its browser, Internet Explorer 7, will make it easier for people to keep automatically aware of website updates. IE7 will have an orange button on the toolbar which will light up when it detects a Really Simple Sndication (RSS) feed on a site.

Users can click on a 'plus' button to subscribe to the site's feed, as they would with a bookmark. The new browser is due to be released this summer.

It had its public debut at the Gnomedex technology conference in the US city of Seattle on Friday.

The open-source browser, Mozilla Firefox, already lets web users subscribe to feeds of websites they read regularly, such as weblogs and news sites.

The move is part of wider plans Microsoft has to integrate RSS formats throughout its latest version of Windows - Longhorn - which it sees as a major step forward.

'We are making sure that throughout Windows the experiences for users are easy,' said Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team.

When I subscribe I can say what is interesting to me, the machine can do the work, and I can enjoy the fruits of its labour

'We want RSS everywhere. I want it in more than just the browser and aggregators. We want to help RSS get even bigger and better than today.'

Appropriately, Microsoft's RSS team has an MSDN RSS feed MSDN RSS feed that we can use to follow developments and a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/default.aspx.

At Coraider we have been building RSS into almost everything we have done for several years and working hard on evangelising it to the UK Police. I gave this presentation at several forces in 2003. I still think it holds up well.

Maybe at last we will start to get some benefit from all this work.