The predominant use of RSS for knowledge workers will be related to process in my opinion. Getting notification that an order has been received, an invoice needs approval, or that parties have reached agreement on a contract is more important than an RSS feed of a persistent search using Google or Technorati for the company’s ticker symbol. As valuable as it might be to follow news stories about a company, it doesn’t necessarily improve their business processes and thus doesn’t really matter to the knowledge worker.

Attensa gets this. And they understand the value of tracking “attention data,” a fancy term indicating that a user’s behavior in reference to feeds is tracked for purposes of reporting. What feeds users pay attention to can translate into “which projects are getting attention from a particular group of users.” But extend this concept one step further by considering that a report can be generated based upon the attention stream of a given set of users to see metrics on ALL the systems that have RSS output. One could essentially make correlations between systems that are otherwise not integrated by using the attention data. That’s a difficult, if not impossible, metric to track when email is the messaging medium.