David Berlind has done his homework in What’s wrong with RSS is also what’s right with it. The first sensible piece about RSS all year.
The reality of RSS is that modules have been a failure, and that leaves RSS as a standard for headlines and links and a miscellaneous catch all called description or content.
As Berlind points out you dont always have headlines and links are sometimes ambiguous, so that leaves us looking at a rather naked emperor. But that doesn’t mean to say that RSS isn’t useful as a meme if not a standard.