This article gives us a glimpse of where RSS is today and where it will be in the future. One the areas that I also believe need to be examined is the birth of new personalized information hypermarkets and how they will affect both content providers and content recipients.

With the deftness of someone who has clearly marked a lot of deeply average essays, Jay Rosen has rightly pulled me up for some rather sloppy use of language in my previous post.

I, rather blithely, said: ‘at this point RSS starts to nudge towards a fundamental shift in the way that people keep informed and decide what’s important’. To which Jay’s response is:

Whenever I hear of such a shift, I want the writer who’s kindly tracking it to tell me: this is a shift from what… to what? Found that if you work on “from” and “to” parts, the portrayal of the shift becomes a lot easier.

He also neatly sort of answers his own question - with greater precision than I can ever muster - by saying: “If I visit houses of content, as I seem to do on the Web, that is very different than the content as “visitor” to my house.”

So, to articulate this properly. Where are we heading from…

[First - incidentally a point about terminology. We talk about ‘RSS’, while what we’re really talking about here is ‘Aggregated media consumption enabled by a standard syndication protocol’ (or something slightly snappier - all suggestions welcome). The shorthand is both handy, and ultimately accurate: if we didn’t have RSS (or Atom) - ie if we couldn’t package content in this way - none of this would be possible. But the real change is about what happens at the receiving end, not the distribution end. Indeed, if - as plenty of people seem to be predicting - ‘RSS’ is going to be big next year, there is a much greater need for a breakthrough at the consumer end, in terms of how people actually get this stuff, than there is at the content owner end.]