Recently, I’ve been devoting too much of my quality time to twiddling with my MythTV setup. It gives my old Dell Latitude CPx PIII machine something useful to do. After getting the system up and running, I went the full monty and installed the Myth plugins, which turned a neat little free TiVo-esque setup into so much more, like a media centre with RSS goodness. I just wish that I could have my TV or radio playing in a small window as I do that. And the Myth weather centre with the great satellite animation beats anything I can easily get on any UK website. (The BBC site is getting better, but the navigation is a mess.)
UPDATE: Just as I was thinking about RSS on set-top boxes, I found this story about the Associated Press creating an RSS news feed for the Nintendo Wii. Wow. Except, it’s not RSS. I assumed news feed, meant it was powered by RSS. No, my gaming friends tell me. Still, an interesting way to syndicate news, no matter what the technology. Gizmodo has some screen shots. Nice mash up. Wii owners, let us know how this works.
People talk about RSS being an edge case activity, but that really misses the point. RSS is a powerful tool in its own right, but now, we’re seeing how RSS really unlocks your content from your website, opening up a world of syndication opportunities. It will be the applications where RSS is invisible to the user that really drive adoption, and media companies are only now beginning to scrape the surface.