RSS has captured the headlines ;-) There have been a couple of major ripples in recent months:

• A9 introduced OpenSearch, a method for exchanging searches and results between applications. RSS is the format used for results.
• Adam Bosworth, the influential developer currently working in a senior role at Google, delivered a much reported keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005 (see here and here for comments, and a ppt of an earlier version of the talk spotted here). He discusses how RSS/HTTP might do for data what HTML/HTTP did for the user interface. He discusses the potential of RSS as a single, simple, extensible format for data, to be accompanied by a URL-based query mechanism.

These two discussions underline the use of RSS for application to application communication.

As Ross Singer suggests, most of the RSS discussion in libraries has been about delivering news and other feeds to human consumers in their readers, rather than about its use to communicate between an application and other applications which are intermediate consumers of the data. An example of the latter is given in the course reserves integration mentioned in an earlier post, and Ross gives a similar example in his post.