The more I experience the power of Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the more I realize that it is increasingly the lubrication for the gears of the content machine.
Like any successful protocol, opportunists want to bend it to their will and market forces push on it to become better or end up irrelevant to some superior one. Dave Winer's post today is a positioning statement that proves "the mental doors are wide open" to ideas that favor market forces over the opportunists.
Aggregators have changed my research and analytic life. RSS has allowed me to add multiple streams of consciousness and information which feed my ever flowing, nearing flood stage, river of knowledge...but made manageable because of the protocol.
Think about just one development, tagging, which is sparking services like Edgeio (maybe the Ebay of blogs?) and the increasingly valuable offerings from Technorati (making sense of the blogosphere through clustering and search of them).
At the same time, I am seeing opportunities to leverage RSS absolutely EVERYWHERE. From mashups like Newsvine (news feeds + seeding articles + social promotion = a network customized newspaper) to ScoopGo (ScoopGO! lets you create "Scoops": search engines which search through feeds you choose), the acceleration in capabilities and ideas -- all built on top of RSS -- are incredible.
No question that at some point in the next few years, Dave Winer will be viewed as the creator of one of the most important market catalysts of the 21st Century.
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