I have written a bit on RSS here, often wrongly. (The illustration is from the blog of Andrew Grumet, who brings the complexity of video feeds to the process.)

I have bemoaned the delivery of ads via RSS, both as content and within feeds, as "RSS spam."

My complaints were misdirected, as I learned. The problem was not in the feeds, but in the reader. After I patiently explained my problem to my newsreader maker, I was told "we'll work on it."

And what is my problem?

My problem is I want all the real news and commentary on the field I cover, and that's all I want. You don't get that with a simple keyword field.

As always in technology, problems are usually opportunities turned on their head. New start-ups are emerging that hope to use RSS as a true intelligence gathering service, instead of as a garbage in-garbage out collector.

Recently C|Net profiled two of these start-ups, Bloglines and Rojo.

What they say is what I've said, that separating wheat from chaff is very difficult. They are going about that in different ways. Rojo is doing it privately, just letting a few people in, while Bloglines is doing is publicly, creating a versoin of Google's PageRank algorithm.

Corante is interested in this as well.

Instead of creating feeds out of everyone else's stuff, Corante brings real editors (like me) to bear on the problem. We sift through what's out there and comment, in our own ways, on our own subjects.

The result is some of the best commentary on the Web, but it's all new material. It's accretive. You can spend many hours each day, now, going through our new stuff. You will learn a lot, but will you learn it all?

I don't know.

That's where computers come in.

While the C|Net story talked a lot about RSS in terms of blogs, it's no longer just used by blogs. Not at all. Many newspapers now distribute stories to the Web via RSS, and advertisers are using it as well. (That's the problem -- separating true editorial content out of the advertising flow.)

It's apparent by reading about Rojo and Bloglines that people and PCs must be combined in some way for this to work. But exactly how that will happen still remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, I slog, and hopefully, you subscribe only to Mooreslore to get the best of technology trends today.