In the future, I think we’ll look back at this as the time when RSS grew up. First we get announcements that newspapers are starting to “get it” and are offering aggregators to their readers.

Then Dave Winer opens pandora’s box and points out how the current setup for online newspapers are backwards – who really wants to sift through the whole paper online for the few items they really want to read? – and how aggregators will become the online front-end to media sites. I can’t believe it’s taken them this long to realize this.

“Imagine putting your best news, with links to pages with your ads on it, in the right column of a River of News style aggregator with all your competitors' news on it (and weblogs of course, thank you). Now the readers no longer need to go to your competitors' home pages, you've just given them an incentive to come to you to get news from them.” [Scripting News]

Then, NewsGator releases their product roadmap (on a blog, no less), a visionary leap forward for enterprise RSS. If you’re a librarian at a corporate library of any size, you’ve just been put on notice that you absolutely will have to provide an RSS feed of your library’s information if you want to remain in your organization’s information flow.

“Dino could be characterized as ‘NewsGator Enterprise Server’, for lack of a better name. Imagine NewsGator Online, picked up and installed on a server behind a corporate firewall. Imagine it also (optionally) connecting with Active Directory and Exchange server. No longer would a system administrator need to go install NewsGator Outlook edition on 3000 desktops; rather, with Dino, they could install a single server, make some configuration choices, and employees will just get ‘more stuff’ somewhere in their Exchange mailbox without having to install anything on their own machines. Outlook; Outlook Web Access; Blackberry; Exchange ActiveSync; all of this is enabled by the Dino/Exchange integration.

Not using Exchange? Not a problem. Dino will have a version of NewsGator Online's web-based aggregator (also also mobile edition, email edition, and media center edition). Many potential customers have asked us about an intranet-based aggregation solution, and Dino fills the bill for this as well.

And with sophisticated indexing capabilities, and integration points with other enterprise systems, Dino can become a central information distribution point for all kinds of content.  All managed in one place, leveraging organizational structure in Active Directory (if available).” [Greg Reinacker’s Weblog]

And of course, when all of this hits the corporation, your neighbors, and your grandmother, it won’t be called RSS. It will just be called efficient.

And hopefully, your patrons will be able to subscribe to your library’s RSS feed and we’ll start teaching a whole new level of information literacy.