Newstex is an interesting firm that’s creating a new business model for bloggers with its Blogs on Demand service. Basically, the firm licenses the fulltext of posts from selected bloggers, indexes them in near real-time, tags them with company/people/subject category codes for fast and precise searching, and makes these feeds available to third parties or directly to corporations that want to make blog content available to their employees. So far the highest profile 3rd party that has licenses Blogs on Demand from Newstex is LexisNexis.

All well and good. But in interviewing Newstex’s CEO Larry Schwartz for an upcoming article in The Information Advisor, I was taken aback when he told me that “RSS is on the way out” since bloggers are pulling off their feeds from concerns that their content being scraped, and so fewer Internet users are coming to their site directly.

I’m sure there will be lots of interesting new models like Newstex as the blog world evolves, but is RSS really on the way out (already!?) So far I don’t see the evidence. But maybe I’m wrong and time will tell. One of my colleagues will be at the Syndicate conference next week and he will be keeping me up to date on what he finds out there…which will be passed along here in this space…

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