A lot of people are talking about RSS as being the next big thing on the web. Why? On the surface, the answer seems to be that RSS lets users build their own views of the web, using aggregators, rather than having to visit many sites manually, and doing the aggregation manually. I think there's more to it than this.
RSS aggregators are basically just filtering and sorting programs. Google is an example of a filtering and sorting program too. Most RSS aggregators do filtering and sorting based upon the content of the RSS feeds to which they substribe. Some go further, however - like feedster.com - and use another form of data, or metadata, which captures changes to RSS feeds. Feedster uses weblogs.com to find out when RSS feeds change, and this helps it index more efficiently, as well as provide another dimension of filtering based upon change.
I think that weblogs.com is a primitive form of what I've been calling the deltaweb - the web that describes ongoing changes to the web. This is what's really beyond RSS as we know it today. The RSS of tomorrow will include a formalization of how we characterize changes to things.
I've noticed some cool things going on in the world of "change related" software. Bram - who wrote BitTorrent - is now working on Codeville which is all about channeling and integrating change information among P2P nodes.
10:33:14 AM 
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