Open Question: What would you do with RSS?
While Dave Winer and his merry band of monsters battle over the future of “Really Simple Syndication,” I’m left wondering what the hubbub is all about. So, RSS can be used to syndicate and aggregate news items. Great. It’s done that fairly reliably since version 0.91. But what’s next? If developers are expected to care enough about RSS to build compelling applications that either consume or produce it, then I would argue there need to be at least a few use cases that go beyond “read news story.”
In short, what’s the vision? Is it Paul Ford’s interpretatation of the semantic web? If so, could someone please connect the dots between NetNewsWire Lite and the Google future?
In the meantime, here’s a question for you – and I expect you to get creative. If you could aggregate (as an information “consumer”) or syndicate (as an information “publisher”) any kind of information that could be shoehorned into a “title / description / URL” construct, what would it be, and why?