James has been hitting the (forgive me, dear readers) “RFP 2.0” need pretty hard of late. It seems to me that the idea of companies paying attention to blogs and the web for “Online RFPs” calls for an RFP microformat.
Seriously though, if we can hammer out the fields we’d need, it’d be “easy” enough to come up with a 0.1 version of the RFP microformat. Then we just need someone (technorati?) to aggregate it.
Imagine if you were Sun, IBM, or Jane’s Regional Network Hosting. You come into work and over your cup of coffee you type in “technorati.com” and then a search string like “needs:bandwidth” and you’d get all the responses from people who’d written up RFPs for that sudden spike in Google<->iCal synching (or whatever else). Click a few more buttons — Skype, IM, email, adding a comment — and you’d be whirling up a sales cycle.
Sounds like one nice way to wrap money and even (pardon me again, dear readers) “Long Tail Economics/Marketing” around microformats and those nutty blogs we keep hearing about.
Disclaimer: Sun and IBM are clients.