Gregory Lamb of the Christian Science Monitor has a great, forward-looking piece on the future of RSS:

“Mike Richwalsky has an online helper who keeps him informed. It tells
him when his friends post new items on their websites or new photos to
sites like Flickr. It advises him on what Netflix movies he might want
to rent and gives him the latest scoop on his favorite sports team, the
Pittsburgh Steelers. It also alerts him if his name, or that of
Allegheny College, where he works as a Web administrator, is mentioned
online. It’s even ready to signal him if an online merchandiser gets a
hard-to-find Xbox 360 game console in stock.

His helper is an RSS aggregator. RSS stands for Really Simple
Syndication, and its purpose is in fact really simple: ‘Feed’ the user
information every time a weblog, news source, or a selected website has
been updated with new information.”