The Cult of RSS

I keep scanning the news being blogged on Technorati about Gnomedex 2005, and frankly, I’m still mystified. There seems to be a whole bunch of people who are united in their desire to promote RSS.

Did I miss something?

Don’t get me wrong, I use RSS everyday. I’m a big fan of bloglines to monitor lots of blogs. But we are just talking about a simple XML based text format. Yet as simple as it is, it also has a pretty confusing specification, as is witnessed by the relatively large number of projects which accept incompatible versions of the specification. It is used as the basis for applications which rely on polling to catch updates, which can generate lots of unnecessary web traffic on servers.

And yet, apparently large numbers of individuals converge to laud its creators. I just don’t get it.