Real Clear Politics

For those of you with the political bug and a right of center leaning, Real Clear Politics is a great site. My b-school & BCG buddy, Al Warms, has really done some interesting things with the site. He lays them out in a recent post including a variety of interesting things with RSS and email powered by  FeedBurner. In particular, he has broken the content down in small elements, tagged them and made them available for distribution via RSS. Much like Om Malik’s piece on It’s a Widget World, the future of the web is about small components which users can consume or use as individual situations come up. This has always been one of the promises of Web Services in the world of Enterprise software. Do what you do best and leverage others’ creations and work to fill in the gap. Fred Wilson has written extensively on this topic (Future of Media).

Al has done this with a wide array of content on his site and users can subscribe to specifically what they are interested in. More recently, he has introduced an email service (email also powered by FeedBurner) that allows users to subscribe, not to general election news, but to specific campaigns. Very cool stuff.