Alex Iskold gives a very informative short history of RSS as well as talks about the very exciting idea of extending RSS to have structure. This means the ability to for various web services to deliver content via RSS and yet allow end applications to manipulate the data. Essentially, this is just like taking XML, producing a structured dialect, and merging its functionality with RSS for delivery.

This means, as he says in his example, that your bank could deliver your financial information via (extended) RSS and your feed reader cum feed application could manipulate the information into something that makes sense for you. I.e., it would become a "semantic agent", something it cannot be in its current form.

This would be great for a way to consume custom feeds built in tools like Yahoo Pipes. Right now, I have about 30 pipes built there but cannot view all the information carried by the resulting feeds. I for one look forward to an extended RSS and tools for consuming them - even if the result isn't called RSS. Sure, there are a lot of things you can do with RSS, but there are even more that you can't but should be able to.