Jeremy Allaire is having some interesting ideas about RSS.
I like his idea of RSS-Data, but isn’t the idea of a generic aggregator separate?
Rich metadata in RSS isn’t happening at the moment, the spec is there but the tools to create and read the content aren’t:
1. there are no end user tools to create modules (why not allow people to build their own forms, where each form field is an RSS tag in a namespace that is their email address by defaut?)
2. there are no aggregators that read extended metadata (there are no aggregators that filter by a MoveableType category, for example).
Both these issues are as much to do with UI as data modelling. RSS module builders could use a web forms that build forms approach, (the ‘metacrap’ syndrome would be a problem but there are hundreds of person-years work that have already gone into this with EDI standards such as EDIFACT (I had a go at this a few years back, with a proposal for the fields in webforms)). An RSS meta-aggregator would have to allow users to preselect which new autodiscovered metadata to display in order to avoid innevitable UI issues such as sparse columns etc. In fact the best interim hack for this would be a Excel import tool that read RSS modules on the fly.