RSS, or more generally, web based syndication, appears to be hitting critical mass, but where is the money?
Despite the promise of metadata enriched syndicated content, RSS is usually no more than a way to syndicate a link and a headline.
No large publisher will syndicate their full content in RSS because they would lose traffic and therefore, money.
Without full content no aggregator can add much value by categorizing and filtering infomation, so no purely RSS based aggregator can make much money.
Despite all of the interest around web based syndication, people like Lexis Nexis will still make all the money unless this problem is solved.
The solution that gives publishers traffic and allows aggregators to add value is to syndicate full content in such a way that it can be searched or categorized, but people still have to go to read the article on the publisher’s site. All that is needed to do this is to remove ‘stop words’ such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘of’ and place the tokenized remainder of the full text in the description tag.
Persuading publishers to do this would surely be the best way of focusing community efforts to guarantee the success of web based syndication, rather than concentrating on standards minutiae.