Building The RSS Platform

"To fill in the details, Bloglines is offering web services to let other RSS readers pull from Bloglines, rather than directly from the RSS feed itself. This does a variety of things. Most importantly, though, it could help get rid of the biggest complaint many people have with RSS: that it acts like a denial of service attack on servers -- removing the pain from individual websites (since Bloglines only picks up the feed once per hour). Combine this with Carlo Zottmann's bootleg RSS feed service, where he creates RSS feeds for sites that don't have any for a (very) small fee, and you have solved most of my complaints concerning RSS. This also shows how web services involving RSS are getting more useful, and more creative every day. For example, I've been playing around with (also from Zottmann) Watchcow, a new site for watching Amazon prices as they change via RSS. Combine all of this, and you begin to realize that RSS is about a lot more than just a simple way to read the news."