Of course, this scenario depends on the power of RSS to compress time and drive productivity in the exchange of ideas and information. It's the next step in iterative development: self-selecting groups of users and developers in a regenerative mesh network. Microsoft's RSS engineers are already hard at work--they need buy in from the leadership and a core authoring object that plays fair across the XML blogosphere.

[Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps]

Marc Canter: "Microsoft's delays are our blessing."

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Steve has a few interesting things to say about RSS.

I think the single greatest thing about RSS is that it is a de-facto standard for data exchange built upon an industry standard (that we don't have to parse by hand! <grin>).

... [Some of us] see an RSS-aware container as not just a killer app but a killer platform.

Exactly. This is the reason that, as Steve points out, some of the most interesting aggregators are the ones that integrate into Outlook.  When I have a single place I can go to find all the information that is relevant to me - whether that's my corporate e-mail, a weblog, or industry news - I will be more productive.

Today I visit DotNetWeblogs far more often than MSDN. Why? Because of just the above. The DotNetWebloggers tell me what's important on MSDN to visit. Yeah, I occassionally visit MSDN, just to make sure I don't miss anything, but I do notice that my reading patterns are changing.

[The Scobelizer Weblog]

I'd take that a step further. I don't go to either any more. I don't use my web browser, I use my aggregator. If it doesn't have an RSS feed, I don't read it on a regular basis. I just don't have time to keep up otherwise. It's the only reason I can keep up with 100 blogs.

And it's even more important when the content doesn't update every day. I'm not going to check MSDN all day to see if a new article happens to have been posted. But now I don't have to.

It isn't quite a push model, but it is certainly less of a purely pull model.

I think Microsoft (and many others) are starting to realize the value of delivering content via a syndicated feed. More extensive consumers are the natural next step. Let's just hope the management at MS is as receptive as they seem to be about exposing RSS feeds in the first place.

I believe RSS is a real-world realization of the "universal" promise of XML. SOAP is another. With the former, we make data universal while in the latter we make programming logic universal.