Daniel Terdiman's post RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy for WIRED in November of 2004, was a preamble to the possibilities.

My business partner Kris Smith has been saying for quite a long time that public or university libraries are prime for RSS. Imagine being able to log into your local or university library, plug in a number of search terms for some research you're conducting and getting all the data in one feed.

Beyond libraries, local and state governments could be using RSS to keep its citizenry informed and engaged in local zoning issues, school board decisions, etc. The benefit of an informed citizenry can be tremendous. So beyond relying on local or national media outlets, government entities can begin opening up the vault of huge amounts of amassed data.

Now here's the real benefit of RSS for governments and its citizens. Traditionally if you go to a state or local government website it has terrible design, horrible navigation and is basically repulsive. With RSS, you eliminate the need for a citizen to come navigate the site and seek information - give them an RSS subscription page based on desired search terms and deliver the information right into their RSS reader. I track 100 plus feeds and can honestly say, I don't know what 80% of the websites that the feed come from look like - and I don't care, I just want the information.

Guy Kawasaki points out FeedHub as great concept going for those people tracking a lot of feeds.

The comments and feedback on the post are that people don't trust the system, the filtering will eliminate something they might have been interested in, someone now has data on your personal surfing habits, etc.

I've signed up for the service and will see what happens, before I post my concerns.

The pearl in FeedHub is inspiration and trends. Often times we have clients running reputation management systems that still have a hard time sorting through all their feeds, where they are not necessarily trying to be an A-list blogger, but still seeking to be relevant in current discussions. Put it this way, they don't have a RSS reader obsession, but do have highly interesting and relevant information to bring to the conversation.

Here's a great way to leverage the FeedHub system, and avoiding a complete indexing of all of your RSS feeds.

Go to MonitorThis where you can subscribe to 22 different search engine fedds at the same time, pulling data from Google Blog Search, Google News, Technorati, del.icio.us, furl, Flickr, Yahoo News, etc.

Enter in the search term that is most relevant to your blog and MonitorThis will create the opml file. I use Dreamweaver to save the file in xml.

Upload that xml file into FeedHub and you've got an instant reputation management system set up to give you ideas and inspirations for your blog posts.

Read it because it will save you money. I've been using the RetailMeNot.com Firefox toolbar application when purchasing online. Not only is it a brilliant money saver, but a big time time saver.

My observation from Adam's post is how he is using the RSS feeds from Newegg.com, Techdeals.net and FatWallet to stay on top of what is hot, discounted, new.

Check out Newegg.com's RSS feeds at: http://www.newegg.com/RSS/Index.aspx

Okay, now if Newegg.com was running on our Castlock platform they would be able to offer customers to "roll their own" feeds.

So rather than having to subscribe to three of four major product categories RSS feeds, a roll your own feed application would let you submit a string of search terms that would aggregate into one feed. So let's say I'm interested in Quickbooks Pro and PSP. This gives me the exact specific information I want in a single feed. Not just everything that gets posted into a major category such as Software, or Gaming. Yes, Neweg.com has RSS feeds based on single search terms, but what about multiple?

Love to see great uses of RSS - it will only get better as content producers like Newegg (yes they product content) give consumers the ability to get updated on very specific content of interest.

Follow Adam's advice and make RSS the secret weapon for your power-shopping.

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