I’m in New York again this week, presenting at the Factiva Forum on the topic of Blogs and RSS. The audience is made up of Factiva’s corporate customers–information professionals responsible for researching and tracking content critical to their company’s business objectives.

I just finished presenting on a panel called Blogs and RSS: Friend or Foe, Fad or Future, along with Sandy Hamilton, EVP of Sales and Marketing at NewsGator, James Brancheau, Managing VP at Gartner, and David Scott, Author of "Cashing in With Content".

From a content perspective, I don’t think we broke any brilliant new  ground on the topic of Blogs and RSS, but we did present a broad and optimistic view of the power and utility of unstructured and unfiltered content, even in the face of significant challenges. There appeared to be a clear consensus among the panelists and audience alike that blogs represent the leading edge of a sea change in communications, and businesses need to move from asking whether or not the phenomenon is real to understanding and engaging the medium.

The audience seemed well ahead of the bell curve–70% read blogs regularly, almost the same number use an RSS newsreader, and at least 10% either write or contribute to a blog. That speaks well for the corporate uptake of blogs and RSS. Concerns focused mostly on control of content, including copyright and intellectual property issues, as well as general perception management.

Clare Hart, President & CEO of Factiva previewed some new information technologies they’ll be rolling out Q4. That’s a post in and of itself, that I’ll try to dig into that in the next few weeks. Suffice to say the challenge of information overload is becoming a market opportunity, and information science experts (formerly known as librarians), are coming up with some interesting tools to address the challenge.

One of the most interesting presentations was Steve Wilson, Director of Global Web Communications at McDonald’s. McDonald’s appears to have a pretty advanced approach to blogging and content syndication–and "Lincoln Fry" is not a good indication of what’s really happening at McD’s. They’re using blogs to collect and distribute internal corporate communications in addition to public-sphere marketing; they’re using blogs to stay in contact with franchise operators; and they’re rolling out a sophisticated RSS add-on to their CMS to provide subscription feeds to all their content.

Seth Godin at 4. Cocktails at 5.