Future of RSS?

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been on an RSS kick lately. I wrote a post a little while back entitled What is RSS? in which I explained RSS in greater detail with assistance from Copyblogger.

This week I share a great post from Alex Iskold who discusses the future of RSS.

As the following diagram explains, each site or blog is capable of (and most do) deliver an RSS feed of its content.

The question then becomes what’s next for the “simplest” form of syndication and maybe more importantly how will the content it distributes be deployed? The latest iteration seems to be the use of widgets, which put a colorful, creative or themed front end to an RSS feed.

For example, if someone writes a sports blog they might take a widget of content from ESPN and display headlines from their favorite topic say the NFL. The widget could be customized to reflect the color and style of the blogger with the content of ESPN. Think of it this way, content (via RSS feed) is the art wrapped in a picture frame that the user customizes and places on their blog or site.

Is this form of distribution bound to take off? I don’t know. Will I put RSS feeds of other content on my site, effectively driving traffic off my site? Maybe but I’m not sure.

What about you?

Tags: RSS, widgets, content, distribution, syndication

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