Tim Bray has an excellent piece on the challanges that are emerging from the growing popularity of RSS as a content syndication format. Overall, the growing popularity is supporting trends like micro-content clients and desktop applications that intelligently interact with media and data in the network, rather than the traditional browser-based Internet usage model.
But the big point he raises is that with a move to desktop micro-content clients that talk directly to RSS end-points we loose the portability and server-based nature of Internet applications. For something like catching-up on news, or even potentially contributing a thought to your own weblog, this is a big issue.
I think there's an opportunity for someone to build a service which is itself purely a RSS aggregation web service, available through SOAP or XML-RPC. It should include a fairly rich Flash-based client application that can be used from a browser or downloaded to be used locally. But mostly it would allow people to create their own aggregation lists, and the server-based service would do all the hard-work and scheduled reading/loading. Since many many users read/view the same RSS source, the service would only need to do it once for many people. It would preserve my ability to get at my RSS content anytime, anywhere, eliminate network load problems, and provide me with my own user-RSS feed that I could view through their service or with my client tool of choice.
update: Just after posting this I dug around and found a big chunk of what I've described above, which is Syndic8.com, a fabulous uber-aggregation service. Browse around it and it will blow you away.
11:25:03 AM 
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