Last night a phone call from Chloe Stromberg at Forrester in San Francisco. She is working with Henry Harteveldt writing about the use of RSS by travel websites and wanted to know if we had developed one-to-one RSS feeds (yes), with end to end encryption (no). People have been discussing this as a possible solution to the issue of spam filtering. Why should I open my genuine mail from eBay or Paypal if I am deluged with Phishing scams (emails that purport to be genuine asking me for my credit card details)?

An RSS reader may be the answer to this. Market Sentinel produces account specific RSS feeds (all the information personalised to one user) but do not yet encrypt. Instead we make security a condition of our contract.

Two solutions:

1) A secure website updates a feed first with neutral information in the feed title, say the words: “account notification” and keeps the description blank. The user then clicks the link to access the secure site using browser security.

2) The RSS feed itself is https and the feedreader and publisher exchange tokens.

I met on Monday an interesting company offering packaged RSS to City institutions and traders. This is a service they might appreciate, and pay for. As I said to Chloe: we would happily build it for anyone willing to pay!