I’ve been using RSS feeds for the past 9 months or so and I’ve seen some quite nice improvements. Not in RSS itself, but it the way sites use it.
Take for instance Slashdot. they used to have a feed that contained just an excerpt of the article. Since a few weeks now the feed contains the full article text and still no ads. I love it!!
Then there is Blabbermouth, my source of Metal news. They used to be without RSS feed and I had to lookup the site everyday to see if anything interesting was posted. I was about the mail their webmaster asking for RSS support when all of a sudden they had redone their site and had included an RSS feed! The feed does not contain the full article text, but it’s also not an automated “first paragraph only” feed. They actually use a seperate excerp that sums up the article. This is great, because it prevents items like “John done informed us of the following: …”.
On a more personal note I implemented an RSS feed as part of the logging of an automated process I wrote the scripts for. This way I can keep an eye on the process as well. I have a normal error feed and a debug feed, which gives me some debug info. It’s been useful already!
