I finally have some time to write about the presentation I helped give at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this week. I spoke about Disney's use of RSS, weblogs, and wikis in the workplace.

To be honest, I was a little concerned before I spoke that the crowd would think what we had done was simple and not 'emerging'. I mean RSS and weblogs are nothing new to the people that attend the ETech conference.

Happily, everyone seemed duly impressed and we felt that our talk was worthwhile and of some benefit to others. Many people wrote about the talk. As asmall sampling, take a look at Ross Mayfield's notes (with a TON of trackbacks), Cory Doctorow's notes, group notes taken in the session via Hydra, a person at edweblogs.org that gets my message, good insight from Tim Bishop, and more if you want to google or technorati them up.

Before the talk, we discussed if anything was going to raise eyebrows, and we agreed that the RSS vs. Atom thing would probably do so. While many see the choices as between RSS and Atom, we tend to see it as a single choice for the use of syndication. Syndication of information is the real change we are seeing, not the specific flavor. RSS works and has a wide variety of uses. Atom promises to make ingest & reuse of content even simpler. Both will probably have place within Disney.

I am a bit interested in the stats behind the number of RSS aggregators shipped. With Disney's revealing that the our Motion product is really a RSS aggregator in over two million computers, it's got to be one of the most widely shipped ones out there.

The talk was fun and I enjoyed it. I guess I better figure out something else cool to work on if I ever want to speak again.