When webmasters first hear about RSS they tend to concentrate on promotional side of things. They want to know how it will bring more traffic to their site and get them higher rankings in search engines. Webmasters always seem to ignore fact that RSS can be used to keep up to date with your field of interest with little effort and saving you precious time. Time you could be spending promoting your site.

If you are a webmaster one of most time consuming activities is keeping up to date with what is going on in your field of interest. Usually you would be trawling search engines, visiting forums and frequenting websites that cover your area of interest as well as sites of you competition. This as you well know takes time. You have to visit each site, see if there is any new content and then read it. What you need is a way for all this information to be gathered into one place where you can quickly scan through any new information.

There is no doubt in my mind that RSS is here to stay. RSS is a simple and effective means of communicating your message to your visitors without invading their privacy or spamming them. It has many benefits over email and there have been many reports of death of email due to continual rise of mass spamming and non delivery due to spam filters. By no means is email dead, it is still best personal communication method besides picking up phone. It's just that RSS does some things much better than email.

I have been informing and educating webmasters about RSS since I first discovered potential of this medium. A whole industry has now grown up around RSS and now there are directories that specialise in listing RSS feeds and tools to help you create RSS feeds. Everyone seems to be jumping on bandwagon and everybody seems to have their own opinions about how RSS should be used. Even Google has joined in to offer adsense in RSS feeds.

The problem I see is that improper use of RSS may well send RSS way of email. Currently it seems that if you publish an RSS feed contents of that feed seem to be considered public domain. The reasons for this is, I believe, to do with way content is packaged in RSS, this makes content easy to syndicate. It is not that difficult to create a script or desktop application to strip out content of RSS feeds and publish them on someone else's website. There is even a few applications being sold for just this purpose.