Is RSS Jumping the Shark?

RSS is increasingly going mainstream. Any day we expect
to see WalMart start a steam with its latest markdowns and sales prices.
Today a
long, informative article appeared on the Yahoo – Technology
site.  Some exerpts:

The technology behind them is called RSS and I rely on it daily to
consult The New York Times, the BBC, CNET News, Slashdot and a few dozen
other Web sites that employ RSS to make the very latest news stories
or bits of commentary available for the plucking.

Some of that upsurge
was election year fever as Democratic presidential candidates
led by
Howard
Dean (news
– web
sites)
daily turned
on the RSS spigot to "broadcast" to supporters.

But Web feeds are no Howard-come-lately. Info generators of all kinds
– big media,
government and non-profits alike – are embracing them.

Disney leverages the technology to deliver video clips for ESPN.com and ABCNews.com.
Apple’s iTunes generates a feed to alert subscribers to its latest sounds.

Anyone who builds a Web site can incorporate Web feeds. If it lives on the Web,
it can be brought to your desktop – or to your wireless device, for that matter.

Hundreds of thousands of Web feeds are available, spurred by the popularity
of Web logs, which account for their bulk. One site that has been sorting
feeds since 2001, Syndicat8.com, added 7,326 in January – its biggest
monthly jump- to its collection of more than 53,000 information streams.

Hell, our buddy Andrew has more than that in his great index Share
Your OPML. But the gist of the article is correct. It IS a "killer
technology…"

from Yahoo