More on RSS

Working at the National Research Council this summer in Ottawa, the 'Information Specialists' (reference librarians) frequently set up 'alerts' for new scientific information in the databases they search mostly. When anything new is added to the database from a journal, the librarian will receive an alert sent to their e-mail indicating that there is something of potential interest to their clients. Rosenberger mentions this in his RSS tutorial and notes that Ebsco and ProQuest provides this service. Steve Cohen emphasises that to 'perform our jobs to the best of our abilities, currency is the key' and this is one way to stay on top of content retrieval and provide the best service to the clients.
It is obvious that the sites that have not yet supported RSS feeds will be left behind in the business world and need to get on the 'bandwagon' to keep up with the 'pack'. Cohen also says that the news aggregators need to be smarter and mentions the 'information overload' being a problem. This comment was supported by my previous blog where I guess I was being a little cynical about RSS feeds. Some news tracking services use keywords to limit the amount of information and Cohen stresses that the feeds will need to be more focuses if RSS is to remain competitive as a 'content delivery method'.
J.D. Lasica talks about the RSS technology being part of the 'push wave' that is based 'on technology, money and a receptive public' and coming from the online publishers. They know that people don' t always return to their sites every day and to ensure that their information is reaching the consumers they provide the RSS feeds for eager subscribers.
I found Robin Good's list of the postive and negative aspects of RSS over the traditional e-mail to be very useful and clarified some aspects that I was not too sure about. I see now the advantages of e-mail newsletters now being sent by RSS directly the user instead of being bounced back by regular e-mail as they are considered 'spam'. However, personal e-mail still has a place in our inboxes of our e-mail or is that slowly being replaced by 'Facebook?'