Businesses are taking a cue from bloggers with a new way of distributing information.

Thomas Claburn, Information Week

The Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, whose members are IT companies that support law-enforcement and Justice Department operations, uses RSS and Atom feeds that came built into its blogging software from Traction Software Inc. to keep committee members up to date on recent developments. "Some of our more technical committees that had some familiarity with RSS saw immediately how they could use that inside their workspace to provide a publish-and-subscribe capability so they don't have to rely on going hunting to see if there's something new in their committee work," executive director Paul Wormelli says.

The institute uses grant money to help state and local agencies adopt new technology, and committee members regularly publish papers that require comment from members in other locations. The benefit Wormelli sees is that information distribution becomes automatic. "No one has to initiate the distribution of information using an RSS feed," he says. "The main purpose is to put things in an E-mail form without anyone having to take the action to do that, and to not force stuff on people that they don't want to take the time to look at."