The announcement of Alacra's new family of RSS feeds for premium content comes as rather a coup for the business information services provider. Anyone can add to their weblog news reader feeds of new report notifications available via RSS from the Alacra Store on specific companies (example feed: Wells Fargo) or from a specific publisher (example: Fitch Research) or even a feed of business news and selected business-oriented weblogs from Newstex (example). The feed provides a headline and a brief snippet from the item, which can be clicked on to bring one to the purchase offer page in the Alacra Store. While it's not likely that the average person will be using this setup to order USD 10 access to press releases, the average busy consultant who can bill through such expenses will certainly be interested, as will analysts and other professionals who focus on specific companies but who want to pick and choose premium reports carefully on any given day.

Focused RSS feeds are a natural for the business and financial analysis community. Historically these users have relied on email inboxes to get research pushed from investment banks and other sources: in many ways their "inboxes" are their desktops. With email becoming an increasingly polluted and unreliable distribution channel, RSS provides premium content distributors with the ability to feed headlines and highlights directly into these users' inboxes via newsreader software and bypass the ugliness of email. Factiva has experimented with RSS feeds for very broad categories of premium news content for their subscribers, but their feeds lack the granularity and depth of premium content that Alacra is offering via this service.

Shore's research into business content purchasing indicates clearly that business content buyers in a broad range of roles are increasingly interested in "just-in-time" content purchasing, especially when purchases can be matched with "top line" business development and sales opportunities. Tools such as RSS feeds from the Alacra Store allow professionals to have a high level of awareness of the premium content available to them on a focused and proactive basis - and to become purchasers of content that's right for the moment. This is a great tool at a great time for business users. The only real question is: what took the industry so long to get here?