Since we’re talking about practical “everyday” RSS uses, here’s another breakthrough, this time from Bloglines …

Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies-FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service-within their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.

While it seems we’re talking about RSS, David Berlind actually reveals otherwhise:

What I’ve been calling “personal RSS,” and Bray has called “private syndication,” Bloglines is calling Unique-To-Me Info Updates. But as I learned from Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, it’s not really RSS (though it could be for those who really want it to).

According to Fletcher, each of the different shippers have a variety of APIs so that third parties can access their shipping information. Among the various APIs, one is usually XML-based and it is those XML APIs that Bloglines is taking advantage of. However, Bloglines is not converting the data it mines through those XML APIs into RSS feeds that can be subscribed to with any RSS reader.

Whether it’s RSS or not, it’s the next step …