Software to deliver instantaneous news feeds, Law School affiliates say

Five investors including John G. Palfrey Jr. '94, the executive director of Harvard Law School's (HLS) Berkman Center for the Internet and Society are banking on a "really simple" code, popularized in the last year by bloggers, to power the third big wave of the Internet revolution.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology can deliver up-to-the-minute news feeds from media outlets to an RSS subscriber's desktop. Now the technology may get a $100-million-dollar shot in the arm. Palfrey and James F. Moore, a former senior fellow at the Berkman Center, have teamed up with venture capitalists Richard Fishman and Ritchie Capital's Steve Smith and Tom Crowley to raise $100 million for RSS Investors, LP, the first private equity fund geared toward investing in RSS technology.

"We are sticking our neck out with the following prediction: RSS, writ large, is the next layer of information technology," Moore wrote this month in his HLS blog.

RSS technology has gained popularity in the last year by enabling internet users to track updates to their favorite weblogs. Mainstream media, including ABC and CNN, have followed by adding their own RSS feeds.

"The basic set of uses right now is subscribing to newsfeeds and podcasts, which are files embedded in news feeds," Palfrey said. Podcasting is primarily the transmission of mainstream radio shows and grassroots audio blogs using RSS feeds.

"There's been a huge growth in terms of feeds offered. It's now in the tens of millions, and it's expected to be hundreds of millions by the end of the year," Palfrey added.

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