Lee: The key is a feed reader with automated search channels. I'm subscribed to a number of high-volume feeds that I just *can't* keeep up with, no matter how hard I try.

So I tell Newzcrawler to derive search channels from those feeds, and every time something pops up sporting a keyword that interests me, I can jump straight to it. If I read the rest of it, fine... if I don't, that's fine, too.

> I wonder if this will be the role of RSS in the future, or if it will start to move to more into the realm of the mailed letter, where it hurts to miss it?

Part of the rise of blogging has been, in my opinion, due to the implied transient nature of the communication. People feel more assured throwing ideas out into the abyss - brainstorming if you will - under the assumption that there is less accountability for mistatement as there would be in corporate e-mail. I believe the transient nature is by design.

That said, people have been trying to stuff square pegs into round holes for decades; so there's no reason to assume they'd stop anytime soon =o)

We'll be talking a little bit about RSS and how it effects us today and what it will be like in the future in our panel, The Future of Content tomorrow. I think you're spot on, I can go weeks without reading a newspaper or watching the news on TV... what happens is the really critical news makes it to you word of mouth anyway (e.g. London). It's interesting tho that even when reading RSS all day and keeping up with it, if your feeds we are subscribed to are so highly focused that we may miss mainstream news all together (e.g. Columbia, London, etc). I think feeds will be only one aspect of what is to come. If you look at the direction XML and XSLT is going information is going to become a lot more portable and distributable... thus more disposable at times.

What's changing now, as compared to a year ago, is the striation and importance of my different feeds.

I interact and "need" podcasts, rss watch lists, plain rss news feeds, and my friend's feeds in different times and ways.

For the people who are using my FeedMail service - http://www.feed-mail.com , the RSS item IS an email and carries with it the same social burdens (i.e. don't treat your mom's email like yesterday's newspaper)

'MARK ALL READ' has this dangerous appeal to me. But it always feels so good after I click it.