Heather Green and Steven Baker's excellent blog at Business Week has two interesting posts available this morning both related to the nature and extent of Web 2.0 tools. 

The most recent is an intro to a new Business Week online segment called Web Smart.  The series of stories will highlight in text and a podcast a different company "that's using the Web to improve productivity, reach out to the public, rev up marketing, or streamline internal operations." The first Web Smart profile is on Boeing, who apparently uses blogs both internally and externally.  Sounds like a great series.  Examples of corporate use of new web tools, amongst companies large and small, are very useful for those of us who try to get others turned on to the possibilities.  Perhaps Biz Week's series will shed some light on the debate over Steve Gilmor's statement that corporate executives are using RSS to bring them the information they need on their field - other discussion members said he was crazy and that corporate adoption of feed reading is in its infancy. (Discussion in some random recent episode of the otherwise great show Gilmor Gang, where some people say that "strong bloggers don't link" - so what's the point.  Grr....)

Speaking of RSS adoption, Heather Green's post on Saturday pointed to a Google Trends graph showing that the term RSS gets searched for on Google more than the word blogs and far more than podcasts.  Besides the fact that RSS is also the acronym for one of the largest membership organizations in the world, I was unsurprised when I saw results like this as well.  Here's what I left in the comments section of Green's post.  Would readers here agree with this assessment?

RSS is the foundation of all other particular Web 2.0 tools: it's what makes podcasts subscribable, enables us to read more than a handful of blogs, search with persistence and get the social out of social bookmarking when we subscribe to the feed for a tag.  It's what tells us when there's been a change made to a wiki page of interest.  All of those and more are made possible because of RSS, and most instances of each particular tool will make mention of RSS in the description of its use.  All the social media are exciting, and the read-write web is a major change from the past, but it's that combined with access to a quantity information increased by orders of magnitude - with almost zero effort required after an initial subscription over broadband - that represents the huge shift that is web 2.0 if you ask me. 

Thoughts?  To be honest, I do think that RSS is as important as I said above, but in terms of use frequency it's also got the semantic advantage of only having one tense.  People will write about and search for blogs, blog and blogging for example - but RSS is a one-term wonder.