Uttercast: RSS; Who’ll tell us what to read?

After reading Ike Pigott’s article on Media Bullseye, "It’s Nothing Personal," (http://mediabullseye.com/…onal.html), in which he mock-apologized for not following the too-many blogs in his feed reader, I asked myself- will RSS fail as a consumer application? It may.

– RSS is too complicated to explain, even if it’s "really simple." Is it too much to ask most people to press that orange button and set up their own feeds in a reader? Yes. It is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be struggling still to explain it.

– Are there too many feeds to possibly follow? Yes, no matter what topic you favor.

– Do people still need "sheriffs" to round up content and tell them what’s best to read? Yes. Twitter and Friendfeed do that for people Iike Ike and me. News aggregators have the opportunity to turn RSS into something the masses will actually use, by organizing the news and showing people the best stuff to read.

Sound almost like a job for journalists and editors. What do you think?