At SXSW, I facilitated a session on “RSS: not just for blogs anymore”, with Chris Frye of Feedburner, Scott Johnson of Ookles (formerly of Feedster), and Robyn Dupree of Bloglines.
The panelists gave many examples of the non-blog uses of RSS. The most prevalent is audio/video, which currently represents 20% of feedburner-measured content. “Structured blogging” applications like calendars and restaurant reviews are nifty and seeing experimentation, but not big takeup yet. RSS on mobile devices is used by a small number of users, but those users are very heavy users.
The most fun part of the session was the “fireside demo” format modeled after Wiki Wednesday. This being SXSW, there were plenty of people in the audience with interesting RSS applications. People lined up at the mic to give examples of RSS uses and hacks, including:
* Stuffopolis, a utility for keeping track of lending personal stuff
* Toolshed, a toolset for online music promotion
* 30Boxes (calendar) and Dodgeball plugins for WordPress by Andy Skelton
Here’s the delicious list