RSS is already changing the face of the Internet; rocketing blogs to the forefront and cementing the dominant position of portal and news giants such as Yahoo! and CNN. Not surprisingly, playing poorer cousin to their world-facing kin, the corporate portal is now beginning to use RSS, to the benefit of employees and their host organizations.

Michael Rudnick, my colleague and fellow co-host of the Intranet Insider community on Communitelligence.com, believes RSS could in fact change the face of portals.

“Organizations that deploy RSS readers for internal content enable employees to create their own personal news or content update site to keep track of changing information that's relevant or interesting to them,” says Rudnick, the Global Intranet & Portal Practice Leader at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, in his most recent article Comunintelligence.com Communications, Marketing, PR, HR Portal - Blogs. “This is the true definition of a "My Site.”

“Some basic areas where RSS is perfect include employee communications and internal news, HR communications and benefits updates (helpful for annual enrollment information, year end and new year changes), facilities information (very timely in the NY area with the current transit strike affecting business operating hours), management communications, and sales force related content (product updates, customer data, etc.).”

Michael is right. We’re going to see more and more RSS on the intranet. This in fact, could be a blow to the corporate portal vendors. If employees can customize their pages with data feeds using a free client like Feedster or My Yahoo!, then this reduces the attractiveness of an expensive portal solution like Websphere or SharePoint.

Now, freebies like My Yahoo! won’t replace a true, high-value portal with integrated applications, employee directories, etc. But these freebies could dampen the market for some lesser portal vendors. Come to think of it My Yahoo! already offers a corporate portal solution…

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