First:
When i came to name this post, i wanted to come up with a name for the whole technology encompassing RSS, XML RPC and all that other stuff related to blogging and intraction. Is there such a term?
Second:
Addy Santos post makes some strong points about the current technology of RSS feeds and blogs, or more in the lines of where it isn't. I (technically) agree with him of the finer points, but i disagree with him about the global purpose of the technology.
Blogs in general are not a bad thing, nor are they a waste of time for picking up information you are seeking. Simply put, the technology is still growing and the benefits from it ,along with any far reaching ideas of how it could help mankind, are still a mystery.
granted, there are a lot of possiblities which could already have been implemented, but you are expecting it to be a 40 year old man with a familiy,house and a dog, when it is still about 2 years old, just learnining it's first moves and testing what it can do and how it can extened itself. every day is a new start and brings new discoveries. The blogging tools are not still suited for this and right now are more for personal use rather then business or anything else (at least for me and i would guess many others..).
"Maybe I'll bake my own XML-RPC protocol handler and RSS ifilter for Sharepoint. Has anyone done an RSS-NNTP-SMTP gateway yet? How about discovery services? Or maybe it is best to start with a P2P based RSS implementation? (Who needs web servers for RSS anyway....) "
Go ahead! this is what it's all about. discovering and developing new things. Now is the time. I believe that people who mess with this technology today, will be recognized as the pioneers of it in the future. I think we stand on the brink of another (although smaller) data mining revolution, and just like the last one, we stand wondering "what the hell can we do with this? it looks pretty cool and i bet it could be used to this or that.. lets see if it fits.. lets develop more standards..." etc.
Mainly, I use the Blogs part of this technology for my personal thoughts and to connect to a community i can relate to. It is better then forums or newsgroups. it's my own space(or home) that just so happens to heavily interact with other spaces. but the incarnation of the digital me in this space is much more personal and is much more descriptive of me and my stuff.
Using the RSS part of this technology without the blogs is something that is just starting to catch on i think, and it's uses are limitless. I think some of your ideas are worth checking out, as are tons of others. These are truly exciting times. Hopefully, the coming months will bring with them an advance in Aggregators (along with that much needed full text indexing..).