I’m a news addict and as such RSS is just it for me. Get all sorts of news feeds into my Outlook (with Attensa – nice beta btw) and follow up on them at least once a day. I also have a lot of queries on MSN Search – especially in the news search – that i turned into RSS, which also delivers some nice results.
Still I’m bothered by how some of the news sources threat this RSS feature and how they seem to see the advantage of it to get information in, but are afraid to use it in a decent way to get information out. One of the biggest newssites in Belgium (De Standaard) did a restyling of their website and used RSS feeds from international newssources to get short international news in their website. If you wanted fast news from them, you needed to install the ‘news clicker’… absurd. It took about two weeks, before they realised this was not done – too much complaints? – and started offering RSS again for their users. On the other hand, the biggest newspaper in Belgium (Het Laatste Nieuws) actually offers RSS for a quite long time, but only with the headers… yes, I do hate that.
But what I’m wondering most about is why it almost always stops at bringing news through RSS, and so why we don’t see much more of those dynamic feed options, like MSN Search is using for example. Why can’t I create my own RSS feed from a query on eBay for instance or a classifieds website. And why almost anybody seems to be exploring the advertising possibilities with those feeds. Might be I’m missing out on something, but show it to me then…