Quick update on what’s going on in the engine room of my agency, LEWIS. We’ve just launched a service called LEWIS Wire, which provides RSS feeds of the press releases issued for all clients. We’ve noticed that many clients haven’t yet RSS-enabled their press rooms, but that reporters are increasingly looking for press release feeds. LEWIS Wire is just coming out of pilot testing, but there are feeds for each client or one for all the news issued by LEWIS in the US. We’ve also provided the code for clients to place the XML image onto their site.

Initial feedback has been good, but there’s clearly a lot of education still needed around RSS (as today’s BlogAds survey shows). Still I think there is an opportunity for tech companies to demonstrate they are in the vanguard and to differentiate themselves by being early adopters of RSS news distribution to help journalists. I’m sure RSS distribution will be a change as big as the one from post/fax to email, so there are advantages in embracing it swiftly.

Funnily, I thought we might put out our own press release about launching LEWIS Wire (which we’d put on our LEWIS feed of course), but it felt too much like the press releases about launching a website from the nineties. And besides, it’s free and I expect many other agencies will do the same soon (if they haven’t already).

Continuing an RSS vibe, we’ve also been culling a lot of the internal email we have by using internal blogs and feeds. For instance, we produce a daily digest of the news called What’s Happening which goes out to an email list of several thousand (mail me here to sign up), which we’ve RSS-enabled here. Feel free to subscribe to that if you only have time to look at a few feeds each day.

And finally, a warm congratulations to my LEWIS UK colleagues for being selected as one of the ‘Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work For’ by The Sunday Times. There are several other agencies in the list (good to see), and a nice one for the trophy cabinet.

Right enough, or this will look like a plug when in fact it’s meant to be an insight into what’s going on. I’ve got some other RSS-based ideas, so I’ll update on those once they come out of the skunk works.