The Importance of RSS
Kevin Hale: The Importance of RSS (to Google, mostly). [from Slashdot]
And so RSS feeds provide Google all the goodness of blogs without all the semantic garbage that might come with a system open to users that are not the content provider. RSS feeds provide Google clean data, good data and thanks to wide-spread adoption by companies and the major blog software entities, lots of it.
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In addition to improving their search results, I think another reason Google is embracing RSS is because they don’t want to have to compete with it.
Kevin also offers us all a nice sound-bite of the zen of syndication:
For those of us that have adopted RSS feeds, gone are the days of wasting time making the rounds through over 100 bookmarks just to see who might have said something new. Gone are the days of waiting for the few obsessive compulsive bloggers who actually did that to post their findings so the rest of us could stay informed. Subscription makes it easy. Subscription makes it efficient.