RSS Primer

Softwareblog points to ventureblog's RSS-as-a-business primer:

• Browsers (readers): As RSS spread widely, thoughtful engineers designed a series of useful readers. These allow you to specify the content you want, and the reader will find and deliver it to you. There are now many readers, including You Subscribe, NewsGator, and IntraVNews (for Outlook), SharpReader (Windows client), NetNewsWire (Mac), Bloglines and My Yahoo (Web), as well as  many others.
• Plumbing: We are just starting to get tools to deal with the profusion of RSS content. These include…
  • RSS Search engines: Technorati,   Feedster, and others.
  • Portals for RSS content: Technorati, FeedDemon,   Bloglines, Syndic8, Del.icio.us, Blogdex, etc.    
  • Content Managers & Servers: Six Apart, Blogger, Feedburner, others.
  There are still   interesting services to create in this area, including personalization,   security, and other tools surrounding RSS. Plumbing is the area getting the   most VC attention these days. When a VC says they're looking into RSS, they   generally mean infrastructure.
• Media: This has grown up with the readers. Some of the existing players are now supporting RSS feeds, and the blogging phenomena has thrown up some new stars (Boing Boing, Instapundit, Endgadget, etc.).
• Business: RSS is still in the plumbing phase, so business and commerce concepts, such as advertising inserted in RSS feeds or charging for subscriptions are just now starting to appear. Some companies are also starting to poke around consumer commerce - Dulance, for example, is providing RSS feeds of price search results, so you know when prices change on items you've been eyeing. Others are exploring syndication of business data, or using RSS as a business communications standard.