Syndicate the Wagons

As part of my continuing job search, I’ve been trying to keep an eye on developments in the Vancouver technology community. This is a time-intensive process to say the least, what with all the individual sources of news on the Vancouver technology scene and business environment that are available.

One of the common complaints I’ve heard about the Vancouver business community is that the community is extremely fragmented – everyone seems to be running around, doing their own thing. As a result, the impact of any single effort is greatly reduced due to the duplication of work and the lack of critical mass required to garner attention from stakeholders within the community. Furthermore, even trying to figure out what’s going on in the community is even more difficult, given the number of groups providing information, publishing reports, and organizing events.

What the Vancouver technology business community needs is one group to take the reins, to use its partnerships and technology savvy to pull together these disparate sources of information and provide them en-masse to the community.

In an ideal world, this would not be a difficult task – after all, the technology to accomplish this consolidation of information has already been created using XML: RSS/RDF syndication. Ideally all major local business organizations and associations would syndicate their news, their event calendar, and even their job postings, enabling individuals to aggregate these feeds to suit their individual tastes. Unfortunately, none of the organizations syndicate their content, and mentioning RSS to these organizations might elicit some rather weird responses (“RSS? Oh yeah, I love him. Especially that song he did with Eminem.”)

That presents the opportunity for some capable party within the local community to step up and either enable organizations to syndicate their content, or do it on their behalf in a manner that adds to the value of that party’s own offerings. There’s one party in particular that I think is well-positioned and capable of performing this task, while improving their own performance: T-Net, the maintainers of the BCTechnology.com site. Not only would this provide a valuable service to the business community, but it would also provide T-Net with additional readership that it could parlay into additional revenue streams for its job posting and advertising businesses.

To gather these scattered information sources, T-Net could employ some rudimentary screen-scraping (ugh, I know, but there’s no choice in a world without RSS/RDF) technology to extract excerpts of news postings and link to the original item, thus presenting readers with a “complete” picture of what’s going on in BC business. If it was really smart, it would even allow readers to customize their interface to include only those sources in which they are interested – thus allowing them to extract even more valuable demographic information to drive its existing product sales or develop new products. In the long run, it would help organizations in the business community adopt the technology required to make spreading their message even easier, thus cementing T-Net role as the one-stop source of information on the BC technology scene.