Darwinian Web blogger Adam Green speculates about how Google’s accumulating RSS data might transform the Internet, claiming that it’s all part of how Google Base “will blow the web apart within the next 6 to 8 months”:
“Instead of a website being a ‘place’ where data ‘is’ and other sites ‘point’ to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why ‘go’ to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream?”
As the folks at if:Book observed, this prediction comes just as Feedburner* issues a market report on the potential future of RSS. If you’re wondering what Feedburner is, let them explain it to you:
“Many months ago, we were speaking with a commercial publisher and one of the people in the room asked, ‘Why should we distribute our content via RSS if we have no idea how we’re going to monetize it?’ Another person from the same organization answered, ‘Would you rather have visitors or subscribers?’ We love a rhetorical Socratic dialogue just as much as the next person, so we’ve adopted this response as FeedBurner’s theme: Publishers value subscribers. Services that promote, facilitate and measure subscription are important. This is FeedBurner.” (emphasis mine)
The company plans on making several announcements in the coming months on its “thoroughly open approach to leveraging the structure of the feed in order to add activity and meta-data feedback to the site.” Which I think has something to do with opening up new lines of communication between subscribers and publishers that take websites even further out of the equation… This may bear watching.
Disclosure: I use Feedburner to generate the XML feed for my other blog, Beatrice.