Doing some unexpected research on international use of character sets (thanks again, IE7!)… and I came across something called AlertInfo, which I hadn’t heard of before. Basically, it’s an open-source RSS reader for the French market, produced by an organisation called Geste – ‘groupement des editeurs de services en ligne’. You don’t exactly need an A-level to translate that, do you? 🙂
Nothing spectacular about the software, at first glance. What’s remarkable is that it’s an initiative supported by a large number of competing French media players – such as newspapers Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation – with the apparent aim of extending RSS takeup, in the interests of the industry as a whole. Can you see that happening in the UK?